Inhaled lipopolysaccharide challenge as a model of pulmonary inflammation in ARDS
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Inhaled lipopolysaccharide challenge as a human model to investigate potential therapies in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome
IRAS ID
1006421
Contact name
Danny McAuley
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Belfast Health and Social Care Trust
ISRCTN Number
ISRCTN16086655
Research summary
ARDS is a very serious condition that affects people who are in the hospital's intensive care unit. It happens when someone has another illness like an infection in their body. In ARDS, the immune system, which usually helps protect our bodies, causes an exaggerated inflammatory response and harms the lungs instead. This causes the lungs to become damaged and filled with fluid making it hard to breathe and get enough oxygen. Inflammation is a normal process which occurs in response to illness or injury. Normally it allows immune cells to target specific areas, but when this is dysregulated it causes harm to normal tissue.
When someone gets ARDS, there's a 40% chance they could die from it. There isn't a specific medicine to treat ARDS. Severe COVID-19, which has some similarities to ARDS, responded to treatment with a drug called baricitinib, and we want to explore how it could be used to treat people with ARDS. To do this we want to test how the drug works in the lungs of healthy people.
Some of the volunteers will get the baricitinib and others won't get any medicine. To see how the medicine affects the lungs, the volunteers will breathe in a special particle called lipopolysaccharide (LPS) which causes an inflammatory response which is similar to that which we see in ARDS but to a small degree and for a shorter time period. The amount of LPS that we give is similar to that which people would be exposed to if they smoked 5 cigarettes.
We will do a test using a small camera called a bronchoscope. It's a thin tube with a camera at the end that goes into the lungs through the mouth. This lets the scientists look at the lungs and take samples. We will compare the responses in the lungs between the group that got the baricitinib medicine and the group that did not.
By doing this, we hope to find out if baricitinib can help reduce the inflammatory response in the lungs of people with ARDS. If it works well, it could be used as a treatment for ARDS in the future.REC name
London - London Bridge Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
24/LO/0081
Date of REC Opinion
28 Mar 2024
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion