There are well-documented examples of sex-specific clinical features of many lung diseases. Yet, our understanding of how a patient’s sex influences lung disease pathogenesis remains limited. This symposium will cover recent breakthroughs in our understanding of lung disease enabled by the application of single-cell profiling technologies. This session reviews the current landscape of ARDS, cystic fibrosis, asthma, and COPD pathophysiology discoveries through the lens of single-cell profiling and the role of sex-specific contributions. As we review these recent breakthroughs, we will highlight the strengths and limitations of this approach and discuss emerging technologies that will shape the future of this field.
• Describe recent findings from scRNAseq analyses that improved our understanding of sex-based lung disease pathogenesis
• Understand the role and limitations of single cell profiling in the future of clinical pulmonary medicine with an emphasis on sexually dimorphic clinical features
• Define emerging single-cell technologies and analytic techniques for the study of lung disease and outline a pathway to properly sample, process, and analyze samples for sex-specific studies
Shannon Kay, MD, MS
Francesca Polverino, MD, PhD
Jonathan Kropski, MD
Using Transcriptome Metanalysis to Uncover Sex-Specific Mechanisms of Asthma Pathogenesis
Lung Spatial Profiling Reveals a Sex-Specific T Cell Signature in COPD Patients with Fatal SARS-CoV-2 Infection
Sex-Specific Pathogenic Cell Populations in the Fibrotic Lung