MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A new inhalation facility at West Virginia University will allow researchers to discover the effects of inhaled particles on human health, thanks to a $1.7 million grant from the National Institute of Health.
“The inhalation facility is a specialized laboratory where we can create artificial atmospheres of the pollutants that we breathe in,” Director Dr. Timothy Nurkiewicz said. “We can document it and measure it in real-time, and then we expose laboratory animals to those pollutants and assess what the health effects are.”
The goal of the facility is to be able to assess the health effects of a variety of toxicants because humans are not exposed to only a single pollutant.
“When you walk out the door in the morning, you’ve been exposed to something, most likely, in your house, then you experience something different in the environment or in your car on the way to work, and then when you get to your workplace, you’re exposed to other aerosols,” Nurkiewicz said. “It really is a moving target. We have to be able to assess all three toxicants to identify what the collective health effects are.”
Nurkiewicz said research will be geared toward three types of toxicants, including ambient air pollutants.
“That’s any type of background air pollution, whether it be from emissions or combustions associated with fire, engines and things like that,” he said. “The second is nanomaterial exposures, which we encounter in our lives daily, and then the third type is through cigarettes, e-cigarettes and vaping.”
Nanomaterials to be examined through the research will cover a broad spectrum.
“It covers everything from the cosmetics and medicines that we use, to surface coatings on our electronics, to antibacterial surfaces, to filters that clean our air and our water,” Nurkiewicz said. “Essentially, it’s a host of chemicals or substances that improve or make better the quality of the original product.”
Though Nurkiewicz is the director of the facility, his research is not the only one that will be able to benefit from the use of the inhalation lab.
“In my research program, we’re interested in the maternal-fetal effects of exposure to inhaled pollutants, and then we collaborate with a variety of groups throughout Morgantown and the country that are interested in what the pulmonary effects are, for example,” he said. “Other groups are interested in skeletal muscle. Some folks are interested in stroke or behavioral outcomes. In essence, the facility was created to provide a foundation for broad collaboration across the university.”
The opportunity for collaboration is possible because multiple systems of the human body see effects from what is breathed in, contrary to earlier belief. Nurkiewicz said previous understanding was that the toxicants that made people sick was hailing from the lung.
“Modern research and modern epidemiology has identified that it isn’t necessarily all pulmonary disease. It’s cardiovascular disease. There are extrapulmonary consequences outside of the lung, including the heart, the kidneys and the liver. There are other targets that we haven’t been considering. As the field has been evolving, other groups have been focused on single toxicants and singular endpoints, and this is not the current model, so we’re kind of taking advantage of our ability to do that now.”
In addition to serving as the inhalation facility’s director, Nurkiewicz is also a microvascular physiologist in WVU’s School of Medicine’s Department of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience.
“What that means is, we study the tiniest blood vessels in the body. When I’m teaching, I refer to the microcirculation as the business end of the respiratory system. It’s why we breathe,” he said. “The microcirculation delivers the nutrients to our tissues and removes the waste. So we’re talking about delivery of oxygen, glucose and things like that, and the removal of waste is things like carbon dioxide. So it’s fundamental to every tissue in the body.”