NC State lands $2.85 million grant for ozone lung injury study
Bottom line
NC State’s College of Veterinary Medicine said September 30 that pulmonary immunologist and toxicologist Dr. Yogesh Saini has received a $2.85 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to expand research into how chronic exposure to ground-level ozone damages lung cells. The work builds on Saini lab findings in mice showing that tristetraprolin, or TTP, helps limit ozone-driven lung inflammation during acute exposures. The newly funded project shifts the focus toward lower-level, repetitive ozone exposure that more closely reflects real-world ambient air pollution, and will study whether boosting TTP-related pathways could reduce injury and improve recovery. (cvm.ncsu.edu)
Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, the grant underscores how veterinary research continues to shape broader respiratory and environmental health science. Ozone is linked to respiratory disease risk, and NHLBI has recently highlighted inhaled environmental exposures as a priority area because they can impair lung repair, worsen asthma and COPD, and create opportunities for new intervention strategies. While this is preclinical work, it could eventually inform how clinicians think about pollution-related airway injury, susceptibility, and recovery in both animal models and comparative medicine settings. (nhlbi.nih.gov)
What to watch: Watch for mechanistic data on chronic, lower-dose ozone exposure, plus any follow-on publications testing whether TTP-targeted approaches can blunt pollution-related lung inflammation before the grant period ends in May 2030. (govtribe.com)
Key facts
- Institution
- NC State College of Veterinary Medicine
- Researcher
- Dr. Yogesh Saini
- Funder
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
- Grant amount
- $2.85 million
- Announcement date
- September 30, 2026
- Research focus
- Chronic exposure to ground-level ozone and lung cell damage
- Model
- Mice
- Key protein
- Tristetraprolin (TTP)
- Project end date
- May 31, 2030
NC State’s College of Veterinary Medicine has landed a new federal research award aimed at a familiar but still difficult public health problem: what chronic exposure to ground-level ozone does to the lung, and whether that damage can be interrupted. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute awarded Dr. Yogesh Saini $2.85 million, announced September 30, 2026, to expand his lab’s work on the mechanisms behind ozone-related lung injury. (cvm.ncsu.edu)
The grant builds on several years of work from Saini’s group on tristetraprolin, or TTP, an anti-inflammatory RNA-binding protein that helps shut down proinflammatory signaling. In a Journal of Immunology paper published January 21, 2026, the team reported that loss of TTP worsened ozone-induced acute lung injury in mice, while systemic TTP overexpression reduced inflammatory and tissue-damage markers after exposure. Earlier work from the group had also suggested that TTP overexpression in non-hematopoietic cells can protect against acute lung injury. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
What’s changed now is the scope. According to NC State, the new award will move beyond acute, high-dose exposure models and examine lower-level, repetitive ozone exposure, a design that better mirrors ambient pollution patterns. A federal grant summary indicates the project will study post-transcriptional regulation of environmentally induced lung inflammation, with preliminary findings suggesting ozone suppresses TTP mRNA while increasing expression of TTP-target genes in lung tissue. That summary also says the project period runs through May 31, 2030. (cvm.ncsu.edu)
That direction fits with the broader science around ozone injury. Reviews and experimental studies have linked chronic ozone exposure with progressive epithelial injury, impaired barrier function, inflammatory remodeling, and in some models irreversible alveolar loss. Other recent ozone studies in mice have pointed to cell-type-specific responses in airway and immune compartments, including changes in club cells and inflammatory signaling pathways that may help explain why repeated exposure can shift from transient injury to persistent disease biology. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
There doesn’t appear to be much outside commentary on this specific award yet, but the field is clearly aligned with NHLBI priorities. Earlier in 2026, the institute convened a workshop on the lung as the gateway for environmental exposures, emphasizing research gaps around inhaled pollutants, oxidative stress, DNA damage, biomarker development, and interventions that could reduce susceptibility to cardiopulmonary harm. In that context, Saini’s award looks less like a one-off grant and more like part of a larger federal push to understand how pollution reshapes lung biology over time. That’s an inference based on the institute’s workshop agenda and the grant’s mechanistic focus. (nhlbi.nih.gov)
Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, this is a reminder that veterinary colleges are doing frontline comparative research on diseases that cut across species and settings. Companion animals and their pet parents share the same air environment, and pollution-related respiratory stress is increasingly relevant as clinicians see more cases complicated by wildfire smoke, urban air quality issues, and chronic inflammatory airway disease. Even though this grant is centered on murine models and human-health funding, the mechanistic insights around epithelial injury, immune regulation, and repair could eventually influence how the profession thinks about exposure risk, susceptibility, and prevention. (nhlbi.nih.gov)
The award also highlights the strategic role of veterinary researchers in translational pulmonary science. Saini, who trained as a veterinarian and now leads pulmonary immunology and toxicology research at NC State, works in an area where animal models, toxicology, and respiratory medicine naturally intersect. That makes the College of Veterinary Medicine a credible home for work that may inform both environmental health and future therapeutic development. (chhe.research.ncsu.edu)
What to watch: The next milestones will likely be mechanistic publications defining which lung cell populations are most affected by repetitive ozone exposure, whether TTP can be pharmacologically modulated, and whether the findings hold up in disease-relevant models beyond acute injury. If the early signal is strong, this project could help set up later-stage translational work well before the current grant period closes in 2030. (govtribe.com)