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Progenitor cell engraftment in the lung: at last?

Nature Medicine volume 21, pages 842–844 (2015)Cite this article

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Engraftment of progenitor cells to effect repair of injured lungs has been a major challenge. A new study combines a conditioning strategy adopted from bone marrow transplantation with a lung injury model to bring this potential therapeutic approach closer to reality.

Bone marrow transplantation is widely used to treat malignancies of the hematopoietic system, such as leukemias, as well as immune deficiency diseases. The hematopoietic system is sustained by hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow. After intravenous transfer, these can engraft the bone marrow of a host conditioned by a cytotoxic regimen that eliminates malignant cells and part of the endogenous stem and progenitor populations5. This creates space for adoptively transferred stem cells to home to the bone marrow and regenerate the system. The steady-state turnover of the lung is very low, however6, precluding cytotoxic conditioning regimens that target proliferating cells to allow new cells to engraft. Although hematopoietic stem cells capable of long-term reconstitution of the entire hematopoietic system can be prospectively isolated3, multiple populations capable of regeneration are present in the lung7.

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Figure 1: Engraftment of lung progenitors.

Debbie Maizels/Nature Publishing Group

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  1. Hans-Willem Snoeck is in the Center for Translational Immunology, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, New York, USA.,

    Hans-Willem Snoeck

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  1. Hans-Willem Snoeck
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Snoeck, HW. Progenitor cell engraftment in the lung: at last?. Nat Med 21, 842–844 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3923

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