More Canadians are admitted to hospitals with lung disease than any other chronic illness, including heart attack. Lung disease, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), is now the world’s 4th leading cause of death.

Edmonton’s Moses Fung decided to see if he could find a new treatment, using cells from lung blood vessels. Previous research had shown lung blood vessels promote lung growth and maintenance.

Inspired by medical researchers who work with very young children, Moses decided to focus his SABC project on lung disease in premature babies. Newborns subjected to a mechanical ventilator and extra oxygen often suffer damage to their extremely delicate lungs.

In the first phase of his project, he learned that certain cells from lung blood vessels (called endothelial colony forming cells, or ECFCs) in newborn rats with chronic lung disease functioned very poorly. Moses increased the number of ECFCs present in their lungs, hoping to stimulate growth and repair.

Sure enough: “Very preliminary animal data … suggests that ECFCs have the ability to repair lung damage,” he concluded. If the results are confirmed, he may have discovered an important new treatment for chronic lung diseases.

Unlike school science where all the experiments have been done thousands of times before, “the SABC competition was a chance to look into something that no one else knows the answer to,” says the 17-year-old Grade 12 student at Old Scona Academic High School.

Lab rats took a little getting used to, he admits. Having never seen one before in the rat-free province of Alberta, Moses says he was “surprised to see one in real life … it was a lot larger than I expected.”

He has already won a summer studentship to continue working on his project with mentor Dr. Bernard Thebaud, an Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Physiology, at the University of Alberta.