Research

 

Within the framework of PCD-UNIBE, various research projects are being conducted on primary ciliary dyskinesia , on the analytics of PCD, but also on fundamental questions about the mucociliary clearing mechanism, the movement of cilia and their ultrastructure. The basic research is carried out in close collaboration with the Institute of Applied Physics of the University of Bern.

 

 

Studies on PCD diagnostics

• A Comprehensive Approach for the Diagnosis of Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia—Experiences from the First 100 Patients of the PCD-UNIBE Diagnostic Center (2021)
• Diagnosis of Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia: Discrepancy according to different algorithms (ERJ Open. Accepted, 2021)
• [How useful is the ultrastructural study of the cilia of the respiratory tract in the diagnosis of an immotile cilia syndrome?] (1984)

 

Studies on the epidemiology of PCD

• Time trends in diagnostic testing for primary ciliary dyskinesia in Europe (2019)
• The Swiss Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia registry: objectives, methods and first results (2019)

 

Studies on the structure of cilia and their motility

• Multi-scale alignment of respiratory cilia and its relation to mucociliary function (2021)
• Ciliary beating plane and wave propagation in the bovine oviduct (2013)

 

Studies involving cilia analysis

• Acute effects of multi-walled carbon nanotubes on primary bronchial epithelial cells from COPD patients (2018)
• Characterization of pediatric cystic fibrosis airway epithelial cell cultures at the air-liquid interface obtained by non-invasive nasal cytology brush sampling (2017)

 

Ongoing projects: Motility analysis

In collaboration with the Institute of Applied Physics, we are developing new software tools ("Cilialyzer") for the analysis of cilia movement. Thereby, novel approaches allow the determination of the efficiency of the cilia beat on the mucociliary cleansing mechanism. This serves an even more objective and functionally very direct detection of the basic problem in sufferers with PCD.