Mucociliary Clearance Consortium

Understanding how alterations in the airway environment, including abnormal mucus and mucociliary transport, leads to the development of chronic airway diseases will yield more precise diagnoses, better standards of clinical care and advance new and effective treatments.

Focus

The mission of the Mucociliary Clearance Consortium is to:

  • Improve our understanding of how the airway environment (including airway surface liquid volume, ionic content, and glandular macromolecules) results in abnormal mucus and aberrant mucociliary transport
  • Determine the limits of CFTR, epithelial sodium channel, and other ion transporter activities required to maintain normal physiology
  • Examine whether mucin biogenesis and post-translational modification pathways are aberrant in CF, and determine their functional relationship to the ion transport environment
  • Develop new preclinical and clinical measures of mucociliary clearance to allow a better understanding of this process, prioritization of therapeutic compounds under development, and evaluation of downstream effects elicited by ion transport modulators

Consortium Membership

Sponsor   Institute  

Steve Ballard, Ph.D. 

sballard@usouthal.edu

University of South Alabama

William Bennett, Ph.D.

william_bennett@med.unc.edu

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Brian Button, Ph.D.

bbutton@med.unc.edu

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

C. William Davis, Ph.D.

cwdavis@med.unc.edu

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Scott Donaldson, M.D.

scott_donaldson@med.unc.edu

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Camile Ehre, Ph.D.

cehre@med.unc.edu

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

Justin Hanes, Ph.D.

hanes@jhu.edu

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine 

Mehmet Kesimer, Ph.D.
kesimer@med.unc.edu

 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill  

Paul Quinton, Ph.D.

pquinton@ucsd.edu

University of California San Diego School of Medicine

Steve Rowe, M.D., MSPH

smrowe@uab.edu

University of Alabama at Birmingham  

Michael Rubinstein, Ph.D.
mr@unc.edu

 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

David Stoltz, M.D., Ph.D.

david-stoltz@uiowa.edu

University of Iowa 

Guillermo Tearney, M.D., Ph.D.

tearney@partners.org

Massachusetts General Hospital 

Dave Thornton, Ph.D.

dave.thornton@manchester.ac.uk

University of Manchester 

Jeff Wine, Ph.D.

wine@stanford.edu

Stanford University 

Suggested Reading

Ion Transport, Mucus Secretion and Clearance

Mucus and Mucins

Novel Techniques and Protocols

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