Airway regenerative medicine: from bench to bedside

Hot topic
Chairs: 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.

Derivation of epithelial-only airway organoids from human pluripotent stem cells H. Snoeck (New York, United States of America)
Induced pluripotent stem cell-derived alveolar epithelial cells: applications with lung-on-a-chip T. Geiser (Bern, Switzerland)
Pulmonary transplantation of human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived macrophages C. Happle (Hannover, Germany)