AZBIO | 2019 |
Arizona Bioscience
RESEARCHER OF THE YEAR
Monica Kraft, MD
Professor of medicine, chair of the Department of Medicine, and the Robert and Irene Flinn Endowed Chair of Medicine UA College of Medicine – Tucson Deputy director of the UA Health Sciences Asthma and Airway Disease Research Center
When every breath is an effort
M
ore than 25 million Americans have asthma, including nearly 1 million Arizonans. An analogous condition, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Asthma and COPD are chronic diseases involving the airways (or bronchial tubes) that carry air in and out of the lungs, asthma makes breathing difficult. The impact of asthma upon the health of Arizonans is significant. The prevalence in Arizona is among the highest of any state in the nation, having exceeded the national average almost every year recorded. Symptoms may include wheezing, coughing, chest tightness and trouble breathing — especially early in the morning or at night. Asthma attacks are of particular concern, accounting for $21 billion/year in U.S. annual health-care expenditures alone. Monica Kraft, MD, is an internationally renowned physician-scientist who specializes in translational asthma research. She is also the 2019 Arizona Bioscience Researcher of the Year. Dr. Kraft focuses her work on precision medicine therapies to treat severe asthma. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Lung Association for over 25 years. She is the principal investigator (PI) of a 5-year, $7.02 million grant from the
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National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study “Dysfunction of Innate Immunity in Asthma,” and of a 6-year, $2.42 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the NIH, for participation in the PrecISE Network, a research network that evaluates precision medicine approaches for the treatment of severe asthma. She also is principal investigator on an Arizona Bioscience Grant and co-PI with Dr. Lynn Gerald at the University of Arizona as a site for the American Lung Association Clinical Research Centers to evaluate new treatments for asthma and COPD. Dr. Kraft has more than 175 publications in the areas of asthma and COPD, such as the role of infection and the distal lung in asthma, innate immune mechanisms in airway disease, mechanisms of airway remodeling and evaluation of novel treatments for asthma and COPD. Her work has appeared in such prestigious publications as the Journal of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, and Chest. Additionally, she has received many honors — including the American Thoracic Society (ATS) Elizabeth A. Rich Award (2019), ATS Distinguished Achievement Award (2018) and the
privilege of serving as president (2012-13) of ATS, the largest and most prestigious pulmonary organization in the world. She also has won numerous honors from the prestigious Parker B. Francis Foundation, including serving as a Fellowship in Lung Research Program fellow (1994), fellow mentor (2007) and invited lecturer (2016). And Dr. Kraft was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers at the White House in 2000. In 2018, Dr. Kraft was named to the NIH/NHLBI National Heart, Lung, and Blood Advisory Council. She also has been elected a Fellow to ATS, the European Respiratory Society, the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, the American College of Physicians, and the American College of Chest Physicians. Dr. Kraft is also co-founder of RaeSedo, a company that is developing novel peptidomimetic approaches for the treatment of inflammatory lung disease. Specifically, RaeSedo technology utilizes a series of peptidomimetics related to surfactant protein-A (SP-A) as a treatment method for asthma, COPD and other inflammatory lung diseases. Dr. Kraft and her RaeSedo co-founder, Dr. Julie Ledford, won the 2019 UA College of Medicine – Tucson Shark Tank competition to further develop this therapeutic treatment.