SEMINAR: Tone reinforces airway smooth muscle: A walk across the spectrum of biological scales

The Seminar: The contractile capacity of airway smooth muscle (ASM) is labile and an abundant literature reports that a great diversity of inflammatory mediators increases its contractile capacity. This acquired hypercontractility is allegedly implicated in the variable component of airway hyperresponsiveness in asthma. However, considering the highly molecular heterogeneity of asthma pathogenesis, the task of identifying a common mend for a tissue rendered hypercontractile by imponderable assortments of inflammatory mediators is perplexing. Tone, defined as a sustained contractile activation of ASM, is a consistent feature of every type of asthma and might represent an overarching phenomenon that converges the many signals from any assortment of extracellular mediators into common intracellular pathways that ultimately govern the contractile capacity of ASM. During my talk, I will present data suggesting that mere exposure of ASM to tone increases its contractile capacity. The discussion will cover work undertaken with isolated preparations of ASM, as well as with living mice and humans.

The Speaker: Since 2002, Dr. Bossé’s main research interest has been on airway smooth muscle. He currently studies airway smooth muscle across the entire spectrum of biological scales, encompassing work undertaken at the molecular level up to the level of the whole-organism in healthy and diseased animals and humans. His goals are to decipher the physiological function of airway smooth muscle and to understand why asthmatic patients experience an excessive decline of lung function in response to airway smooth muscle activation.