Over the last one hundred years, research has lead to important medical breakthroughs. New treatments and cures have provided a bright light through the darkness of suffering experienced by people who have lung disease.

The American Lung Association® of Washington offers a limited number of grants in Washington state to support fellowships and other training for physicians and health care professionals with interest in the care, diagnosis, prevention and treatment of lung disease, and to support research for those same purposes. We are interested in supporting both clinical and basic research directed toward the American Lung Association® of Washington's program goals, with priority given to projects related to asthma, the impact of air pollution on lung health, and smoking among youth.

It is the American Lung Association® of Washington's practice to provide seed money for investigators to start a project, and we prefer projects that can provide a definable result attributable to the Association's contribution.

FIGHTING FOR BREATH: DISCOVERING CURES

People with lung disease are fighting for breath.
For people who suffer from a lung disease, each day can be a struggle for breath; each day can become a life-threatening emergency.

Working in a garden, playing games with our kids or climbing a flight of stairs are simple activities many of us take for granted. But for more than a million people in our region alone, these activities are not simple; they are a dream or a memory.

More than 342,000 Americans die from lung disease each year, making it the third leading cause of death in the United States. During an average week in our region, 2 people will die from asthma, 30 will die from lung cancer, and more than 70 will die from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

Funding for research will save lives. Local and national lung research has already shown success in discovering promising treatments for children and adults with chronic lung disease. Utilizing scarce resources, local researchers have more than halved the number of respiratory deaths in our hospitals. But funding for research is not matching the rising rates of lung disease. There have been no breakthrough treatments for asthma, emphysema, or lung cancer in the last thirty years. For a region with such a high rate of lung disease there is a critical need to provide our patients with solutions and cures.

Cures are waiting. Our researchers are making a difference and discovering cures. Remember the Tuberculosis epidemic that affected our grandparents? Our research ended that crisis and since then we have cured the breathing problems of premature babies through discovering “surfactant” and helped discover the cystic fibrosis gene. Our pioneering research on lung cancer led us to fight big tobacco head-on, with incredible success, slashing smoking rates in half in our region.

Together we can find answers today. In this region we have a wealth of world class research facilities which could serve as the foundation to our becoming the world’s biomedical hub for lung health discoveries. Our $2.5 million dollar endowment campaign will provide the needed incentives to attract and motivate promising researchers in this area to look for new cures for lung disease. Your investment in the American Lung Association’s Centennial Research Campaign will fund a new vision for the fight for breath, and discover the cures that will end lung disease in our lifetime.