Respiratory Diseases

The Respiratory Research Group is committed to bridging the gap between respiratory treatment and research by developing;

• clinical services,
• specific clinical interventions,
• effective patient/health education and
• self-management techniques.

In addition, the team is exploring systems-related organisational approaches to facilitate clinical uptake of new approaches to treatment and prevention.

The group's clinical focus covers a wide range of conditions such as asthma, chronic obstructive lung disease, allergic rhinitis, tuberculosis, and apnea and spans population groups such as children and the elderly. The group has a diverse range of skills and possesses a multidisciplinary outlook through having psychologists, clinical pharmacists, asthma educators, pharmacy academics and management and organisational behaviour experts.

Strengths and Achievements

The Respiratory Research Group together with their collaborators have found that muscle cells from the air tubes of people with asthma and other lung diseases behave differently and these differences may contribute to the chronic inflammation and structural changes in the air tubes that lead to difficulty in breathing. The team are also testing the cells lining the air tubes and deeper in the wall for differences in how they respond to environmental and inflammatory cell stimuli, studying their structure, movement, internal chemical signals, what they secrete to the outside and how they interact with each other. This approach increases our understanding of what happens inside and outside the cells in diseases like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and aims to identify novel targets which may lead to improved therapeutic strategies to reduce the inflammation and manage these chronic respiratory diseases.


The Advanced Drug Delivery Group is focussed on understanding physical properties of materials used in pharmaceutical sciences and relating those to in-vitro and subsequent in-vivo performance. More specifically, the group’s main focus is in respiratory drug delivery science. The advanced drug delivery research facilities are state of the art, and cover all aspects of physical-chemical characterisation, computational and in-vitro characterisation. In addition, the group has formed an Australasian ‘inhalation’ consortium with Prof Peter Stewart’s group at the Victorian college of Pharmacy (Melbourne), greatly enhancing total infrastructure and research output.