Jade Jaffar

This year's ATS International Conference was very exciting and was one of the most highly attended in my (relatively short) experience. Thanks to Rina and the rest of the APSR for providing us with the travel award. I appreciate the opportunity to view the work of other APSR members because the ATS is very large and it is hard to see everything interesting!

I am a research scientist based at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. Along with my supervisor (A/Prof. Glen Westall), we have established a large bank of samples derived from patients with end-stage, fibrotic interstitial lung disease. We primarily use primary fibroblast cell lines in pre-clinical drug development studies.

My personal disease focus is on idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), which until recently had no therapeutic options. We are particularly interested in new models of fibrosis that involve primary, patient-derived cells as we believe they will give us the best chance of discovering better targets for development of anti-fibrotic therapies.

I presented my work in a Poster Discussion session that was in the RAPID format. This format is a recent change in the ATS and every speaker is allocated 90 seconds to present their research. In my session there were many new cutting-edge techniques on display. Some involved 3D printing, some involved single-cell RNA Seq and others were more translationally focused, looking at biomarkers of disease progression. It was amazing to see how many different ways researchers are working on the same problem: how do we best model the disease.

This year I also chaired a workshop on Big Data and was fortunate to meet some heavy-hitters in the field. I am part of the Respiratory Structure and Function (RSF) Assembly and helped organize the workshop. The RSF Assembly is a very friendly group of people and there are a lot of fellow APSR members. If there is anyone who would like to join in volunteering for the RSF Assembly, we are always happy to have more help! Please contact me via the APSR Secretariat (APSRinfo@theapsr.org) for more information.