A child gasps for breath. There’s a frantic search through pockets and kitchen drawers. And then a puff of medication brings rapid relief.

It’s an increasingly common scene. The worldwide prevalence of asthma has been growing steadily at about 50 percent per decade, and much of that growth has been in industrialized and urbanized countries. At least 12 percent of Canadian children, for example, have been diagnosed with the condition.

Dr. Paul O’Byrne is a medical researcher who knows a lot about asthma, and some of that knowledge comes from personal experience. “I had bad childhood asthma,” he says, “and I don’t remember it with great fondness… When I was picking a medical specialty I probably chose respiratory medicine because of my memories of having suffered as a child.” Today, as the head of the Firestone Institute for Respiratory Health in Hamilton, Dr. O’Byrne and his colleagues are pursuing research that may save future generations of children from those kinds of memories.

Scientists at the Institute are tackling the challenge of asthma—and other respiratory ailments—from a number of different angles. One recent study used databases from around the world to take a close look at the annual spike in asthma that takes place at the beginning of the school year. The study led to a better understanding of the causes of the phenomenon and to the development of preventative strategies. Other researchers are looking for clues to the cause, treatment and prevention of respiratory illness at the cellular and molecular level. And still others are developing and evaluating new drugs and surgical procedures. A suite of sophisticated lab tools, provided in part by an investment from the Ontario Innovation Trust, helps keep the research on the cutting edge.

“We span the entire spectrum of research,” says Dr. O’Byrne, “right from genetics and molecular biology through to the bedside.”

Perhaps the most ambitious project at the Institute is a recently-launched study that will follow up to 10,000 Canadian children from infancy to their mid-teens, looking at a range of factors related to asthma. It’s not the first study of its type, but it is the first to build on the explosion of knowledge in genetics and immunology that’s taken place over the last five years.

Dr. O’Byrne will be watching the study with interest; his own research is focused on environmental factors related to asthma, like dust mites, pollens and dander. “We think regular exposure to these kinds of allergens helps initiate the process. We want to know how and why that happens. We’re interested in that initial ‘switch’ that turns on the asthma.”

Does all this effort mean that the scourge of Paul O’Byrne’s childhood may one day be a thing of the past? “I’m much more optimistic about it than I was five or ten years ago,” he replies. “We’re really getting a pretty good understanding of what it is that triggers the process in young children and infants. If we can figure that out, then we have a way of potentially switching it off early on…We’re not there yet by a long way, but there’s a lot of attention focused on it, and that gives me a lot of hope.”