Indoor air pollution and lung health

Aims and Objectives

On average, people spend approximately 90% of their time indoors, either at home, work or school. Therefore, understanding how the quality of the indoor air we breathe can impact on our respiratory health is vitally important. It is known that a wide variety of pollutants are produced in indoor environments from activities (e.g., cooking and cleaning) and products (e.g., building materials, scented candles, personal care products and air fresheners etc.). A particular category of pollutants emitted from such sources is Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), and the emissions of these VOCs can be measured experimentally. As well as being directly emitted, VOCs can also react with components of ambient air, such as ozone, and form a whole plethora of secondary products, and these can be tracked using computational models.

However, what is not known, is how VOCs and their secondary products interact with the human respiratory tract. Therefore, this fellowship brings together experts in indoor air quality, respiratory health, and atmospheric chemistry, to develop an experimental technique for determining the chemical interactions between VOCs and respiratory tissues. The aim is to be able to determine how the chemicals react with biological targets, so that indoor air chemistry models can be extended to also model how changes in VOC composition at the room scale may affect the health of the respiratory system.

The YESI Fellows scheme gave me a fantastic opportunity to move departments to work with some brilliant new colleagues and learn valuable new experimental skills in a different field. Not only did the funding give me the scope to test new ideas, but the results will also form the basis of preliminary data for future, larger funding applications. Overall, the project has been really interesting, useful and enjoyable!

- Dr Helen Davies

Project Outputs

Through this YESI-funded project, we were able to develop an experimental protocol to understand how indoor air pollutants are likely to behave when in contact with the lining of the lungs. This means that we are now able to gather data which allows us to more fully understand the fates of the pollutants following inhalation, and their likely biological effects.

This project then formed the basis of preliminary data used in a larger independent fellowship application, which was funded, that aims to develop the Lung Chemistry Model in Python (LungCHEM-Py) - a computational model for predicting the likelihood of worsening asthma as a result of indoor air pollutants. The method developed during the Discipline Hopping award is still being used and the data is being implemented into the model to allow us to account for the chemical behaviour of pollutants after they have been inhaled.

News story

Breathing New Life into Asthma Research: Helen Davies' YESI-Propelled Journey from Interdisciplinary Inquiry to a Wellcome Trust Fellowship.

Dr Helen Davies (Department of Environment and Geography) has been awarded a highly prestigious Wellcome Trust Early-Career Fellowship for her groundbreaking project, "LungCHEM-Py: A Computational Model for Predicting Asthma Exacerbation-Risk from Exposure to Indoor Air Pollutants." This remarkable accomplishment is due, in part, to the preliminary data gathered during her YESI Discipline Hopping Fellows project, "Indoor Air Pollution and Lung Health," during the 2022-23 academic year. Read the full story.

Principal and Co-Investigators

Principal Investigator

Helen Davies (Environment & Geography)

Nicola Carslaw (Environment & Geography)

Kamran Siddiqi (Health Sciences)

Terry Dillon (Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratories (WACL), Chemistry)

Marvin Shaw (Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratories (WACL), Chemistry)