Pulmonary microRNA changes alter angiogenesis in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer

This experiment was carried out to see if there were any miRNA expression differences in pulmonary endothelial cells between patients with and without COPD. COPD is an inflammatory condition and although much work has previously been performed to investigate the inflammatory cells in COPD there has not been as much research looking at the endothelium through which inflammatory cells must pass through to reach the lung tissue. In this experiment pulmonary endothelial cells were extracted from whole lung tissue removed at the time of cardiothoracic surgery. This was performed for patients with and without COPD. RNA was extracted using the Qiagen microRNeasy kits prior to transferring to the University of Birmingham Biosciences department who performed RNA labelling and ran the microarrays. Once the microarrays were performed quality was checked using ArrayQualityMetrics and the COPD group was compared to the non-COPD group using SAM. The experiment was then repeated using another patient group. MiRNAs of interest were validated with qPCR initially before moving on to functional work.