On the back of Breathing Matters's very successful charity bike ride in June 2011 raising over £10,000 which helped fund very important platelet research into pulmonary fibrosis, this year, my family and I are cycling the 5K route around Richmond Park again to raise more, much-needed funds. 

Breathing Matters is the fund for the Centre for Respiratory Research, UCL (CRR). This fund is part of UCLH Charity (Reg No 22977.

This year, I am hoping to raise £2,000 for research into cystic fibrosis (CF). This is an unusual area for our research, but we have a French post doctoral fellow, Dr Carine Rebeyrol, working with us at the CRR who has published key work showing that the antibiotic Azithromycin can correct the chloride channel defect in CF cells. Both pulmonary fibrosis and CF are characterised by neutrophils in the lung and Dr Rebeyrol is attempting to understand this using human cells in the laboratory.

Dr Rebeyrol plans to spend three years at the CRR and. so far. we have raised £35K from various charities, £30K from the European Respiratory Society, £5K from UCL and £5K from a private donor.  We just need another £10K and we are hoping to raise this over the next year.  In particular, I hope to pledge £2K from Breathing Matters raised by my family at the bike ride.

My 78 year old aunt, my mother's sister, is the one of the oldest patients in the country to be diagnosed with CF having been unwell since infancy, so this is also a matter close to my family's heart.

Dr Rebeyrol will present her findings so far at a European Meeting in September and will acknowledge the help from Breathing Matters on her presented work. CF is an unusual disease for us to investigate at the CRR, but Carine has brought a lot of experience and some important collaboration with French co-workers, so we are very excited by this project.

So please dig deep and donate now.

Please visit our website for further information: www.breathingmatters.co.uk

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