Human Stem Cells Converted into Functional Lung and Airway Cells

Stem cells are simply amazing. In many tissues, they serve as a sort of internal repair system that helps to replenish other cells in people or animals. When the cells divide, each new cell has the potential to remain as a stem cell or actually become another type of cell with a more specialised function. For instance, let's say a muscle cell, a blood cell or even a brain cell. 

Well, scientists have recently made some exciting headway involving stem cells that could hold great potential for those with lung disease or lung cancer. For the first time in history, they've been able to transform human stem cells into functional lung and airway cells. 

"Researchers have had relative success in turning human stem cells into heart cells, pancreatic beta cells, intestinal cells, liver cells, and nerve cells, raising all sorts of possibilities for regenerative medicine," said study leader Hans-Willem Snoeck, MD, PhD, professor of medicine (in microbiology & immunology) and affiliated with the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology and the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative, according to a press release. "Now, we are finally able to make lung and airway cells. This is important because lung transplants have a particularly poor prognosis. Although any clinical application is still many years away, we can begin thinking about making autologous lung transplants-that is, transplants that use a patient's own skin cells to generate functional lung tissue."

These findings reflect off of Snoeck's 2011 discovery regarding a set of chemical factors that can turn human embryonic stem cells or human induced pluripotent stem cells (cells that carry the ability to change into any tissue) into forget endoderm-precursors of lung and airway cells. 

Yet in their current study, Snoeck and colleagues found new information in order to complete the transformation of human ES or iPS cells that form the functional lung cells that cover the surface of the tissues. 

The study notes implications regarding a number of lung diseases, including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), in which type 2 alveolar epithelial cells are thought to play an important role in the illness. 

"No one knows what causes the disease, and there's no way to treat it," Snoeck said, via the release. "Using this technology, researchers will finally be able to create laboratory models of IPF, study the disease at the molecular level, and screen drugs for possible treatments or cures."

"In the longer term, we hope to use this technology to make an autologous lung graft. This would entail taking a lung from a donor; removing all the lung cells, leaving only the lung scaffold; and seeding the scaffold with new lung cells derived from the patient. In this way, rejection problems could be avoided." 

More information regrading the study can be found via the journal Nature Biotechnology.