Elucidating the Role Genotoxic Susceptibility Plays in Pulmonary Diseases of the Mouse and Human

Assessing the ability of diseases states and/or toxicants to cause genomic perturbations is an underpinning of science that should never be overlooked. In human and murine disease models genomic changes that occur many times exacerbate diseases and cause long term effects. Understanding how genomic perturbations are caused by various disease states independent of external exposure as well as toxicant induced genomic changes and how these perturbations can be used as predictive indicators of disease prognosis is a niche which science should investigate. Many diseases and toxicants can cause genomic changes, however I will present work elucidating i) the effects of side-stream tobacco smoke and smoke extract on glutathione-and oxidative DNA repair deficient mice and blood cells ii) the increased susceptibility to cigarette smoke induced genotoxicity in smoking and non-smoking lung cancer patients iii) the genotoxicity caused by asthma in the CC10-rtTA-IL13 transgenic (TG) over-expressing mouse model.