Airway regenerative medicine: from bench to bedside
Hot topicChairs: H. Heijink (Groningen, Netherlands), I. Adcock (London, United Kingdom)
Aims: to present the tremendous potential of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) for disease modelling and cell therapy development; to discuss research that describes the successful differentiation of hiPSCs into airway epithelium containing multi-ciliated cells, which paves the way for modelling of respiratory diseases in a dish; to present the opportunities offered by this innovative technology to assess the feasibility, efficacy and safety of a wide range of approaches, from gene therapy to ex vivo cell engineering, for transplantation and drug screening; to describe the advantages of hiPSC-derived airway epithelium, which will become essential for the development of new strategies to treat severe chronic airway diseases, in association with gene editing techniques.