Pulmonary Alveolus - Regenerative Ability of The Human Pulmonary Alveolus

Regenerative Ability of The Human Pulmonary Alveolus

The following small extracted statement is from a story (taken on Wednesday, November 2, 2011) from the HarvardScience website, a division of the online Harvard Gazette. It had been featured on Harvard University's homepage. The news release (no author is given) from Harvard Medical School Communications was originally posted on Thursday, October 27, 2011:

"Guided by insights into how mice recover after H1N1 flu, researchers at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, together with researchers at A*STAR of Singapore, have cloned three distinct stem cells from the human airways and demonstrated that one of these cells can form into the lung’s alveoli air sac tissue. What’s more, the researchers showed that these same lung stem cells are rapidly deployed in a dynamic process of lung regeneration to combat damage from infection or chronic disease.

“These findings suggest new cell- and factor-based strategies for enhancing lung regeneration following acute damage from infection, and even in chronic conditions such as pulmonary fibrosis,” said Frank McKeon, professor of cellular biology at Harvard Medical School (HMS)."