# The Penn LungMAP 3 team: Defining chronic lung disease

> **NIH NIH U01** · UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA · 2024 · $798,727

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Lung diseases are one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Chronic Obstructive
Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and other Chronic Lung Diseases (CLDs) are among the most prevalent of these
lung diseases worldwide and their prevalence is increasing emphasizing the dire need to develop novel therapies
to alleviate the heavy burden of these diseases on the medical care system and to provide better quality of life
for this increasing patient population. The Molecular Atlas of Lung Development Program (LungMap3) proposes
research teams to expand our growing knowledge of the human lung with specific interest in better defining the
spatial, molecular, and cellular changes that occur in human respiratory diseases. For Phase 3 funding, we
propose to focus on three emerging concepts and challenges: 1) catalogue the phenotypes of adult human lung
diseases at the spatial and single cell level with a focus on COPD, CLDs and more rare diseases that we have
access to via our Human Lung Tissue Bank including alpha-1 anti-trypsin deficiency (A1AT), 2) identify molecular
defects present in the progenitor cell populations of human CLDs through dynamic integration of single cell
analytics with spatial resolution technologies to elucidate disease progression signatures, and 3) develop and
implement new ex vivo and in vivo platforms to mechanistically define the molecular and cellular defects that
occur during the progression of CLDs. This will require the use of advanced transcriptomic, epigenomic, and
bioinformatic approaches to phenotyping cell-cell communication and cell-niche interactions. The Penn
LungMAP Research Center Team has an existing pipeline to acquire normal and diseased lung tissue, and we
have developed extensive bioinformatic software to interrogate changes in cell fates and states in disease from
deep spatial and single cell analysis. The Penn LungMAP Research Center has been extremely productive
during LungMAP Phase 2 support, defining novel cell lineages present in the human lung, characterizing aspects
of emphysematous disease pathology including COPD, and we have begun to define rare CLDs such as A1AT
at a single cell level in addition to providing high quality single cell data from pediatric and adult healthy lung
samples for the LungMap DCC web based platform and the lung research community at large. The strategy of
the Penn LungMAP 3 Research Center is to phenotype the cellular and molecular changes that occur in CLDs
at the single cell level and identify the mechanisms that drive disease progression using novel approaches to
integrate progenitor cell niche regulation using carefully validated ex vivo model systems.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10975261
- **Project number:** 1U01HL175409-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
- **Principal Investigator:** EDWARD E MORRISEY
- **Activity code:** U01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $798,727
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-09-01 → 2029-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10975261

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10975261, The Penn LungMAP 3 team: Defining chronic lung disease (1U01HL175409-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10975261. Licensed CC0.

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