Abstract:
Respiratory tract disease is an important world wide health problem, including
Thailand. Not being treated properly and immediately, patients can die. Lung
transplantation is an effective treatment for end-stage respiratory failure. However, a
biochemical marker for monitoring has not been identified yet. Currently,
transbronchial biopsy is the gold standard for diagnosis. This invasive technique
requires a specialist and highly specific instruments. Moreover, it is a painful
procedure.
This research focused on fatty acid binding proteins (FABPs) which are
abundantly expressed in the cytoplasm of tissues involved in fatty acid transport and
metabolism, which include the lung. Normally, FABPs are present in minute amounts
in blood circulation. Thus, it was investigated whether or not an injured lung would
increase these protein levels in blood circulation.
At first, a cell line model was used, the expression pattern of marker proteins
were studied in the A549 cell line, alveolar type II-cells, treated with xenobiotics
involved in lipid metabolism. But these proteins’ regulation by applied drugs were not
observed. H-, E- and L-FABP are expressed in lung cells, so the hypothesis was tested
whether or not these proteins could be used as diagnostic markers for lung injury. A
mouse lung injury model was established by intratracheal application of
lipopolysaccaride and the time dependent appearance of FABPs was monitored with
highly specific sandwich ELISAs in the supernatant and pellet of bronchoalveolar
lavage fluid (BALF) and in serum. H- and E-FABP did not differ significantly from
control levels in BALF fractions and sera during the experimental time course. And
also no difference in BALF fraction was found for L-FABP, but to the contrary, this
protein in serum reached a peaked at 6 h after insult (152 ± 31.61 ng.mL-1, n=6, p<
0.05). There was still significantly detectable L-FABP at 12 h (123.70 ± 34.64 ng.mL-
1, n=6, p<0.05) in comparison to control levels of 16.73 ± 3.76 ng mL-1. The release of
this protein from other L-FABP expressing tissues was excluded as they were not
systemically affected.
The study demonstrated the L-FABP would be a worthwhile candidate serum
marker for lung injury. The clinical application on either acute lung injury or lung
transplantation patients must be further studied.