Dr. Marija Gredi\u0107, a DZL scientist at Justus Liebig University Giessen (DZL site UGMLC), has been awarded a research grant of \u20ac 324 032 for three years (2026\u20132028) from German Research Foundation (DFG) to study novel mechanisms driving pulmonary hypertension in COPD.<\/p>\n
Dr. Gredi\u0107\u2019s group recently showed that interactions between interstitial macrophages and pulmonary vascular cells promote vascular remodeling in COPD, driven by smoke-specific rather than hypoxia-dependent signaling. An important player in this process appears to be Cathepsin D (Cts-D), a lysosomal enzyme highly expressed in macrophages. The team found strong upregulation of Cts-D in the remodeled pulmonary vasculature of smoke-exposed mice and COPD patients, and demonstrated in vitro<\/em> the ability of this protein to enhance proliferation of pulmonary vascular cells.<\/p>\n With this new funding, Dr. Gredi\u0107 aims to uncover the cellular mechanisms by which Cts-D promotes cellular proliferation and to determine its functional relevance for pulmonary vascular remodeling in vivo<\/em> using cell type-specific knockout models and neutralizing antibodies. Furthermore, findings from the mouse studies will be validated in human tissue samples, and circulating Cts-D will be evaluated as a potential biomarker for COPD-associated pulmonary hypertension.<\/p>\n Ultimately, this research seeks to identify novel therapeutic targets to halt or even reverse pulmonary vascular remodeling and disease progression in COPD patients.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The German Research Foundation (DFG) has awarded Dr. Marija Gredi\u0107 a three-year grant to investigate novel mechanisms driving pulmonary hypertension in COPD. Her work aims to uncover new therapeutic targets to slow or even reverse disease progression.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":54354,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dzl.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dzl.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dzl.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dzl.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dzl.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54344"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dzl.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54376,"href":"https:\/\/dzl.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54344\/revisions\/54376"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dzl.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dzl.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dzl.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dzl.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}