Current Methods in Pulmonary-immunologic Research

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Guest Editor

Kristi Warren

University of Utah

Dr. Warren is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Utah and a Research Health Scientist with the Department of Veteran Affairs. Her research training was completed in several subspecialties of immunology, including transplantation, exercise immunology, and anti-viral and allergic immunity. In graduate school, she studied the beneficial immune effects of moderate aerobic exercise in influenza-infected young, aged and diet-induced obese mice. She then completed two short post-doctoral fellowships working, first, in transplantation immunology, and second, in pulmonary research aimed at macrophages in asthma. After completing her fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, she began a more traditional post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC). At UNMC, she collaborated with many of the clinical researchers and developed a project to understand how sex hormones influence group 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2) in allergic asthma. Understanding the cellular communications that occur between the airway epithelium and lung-recruited or -resident immune cells are key to understanding the pathology associated with asthma and other pulmonary disorders in both sexes. Although sex differences are her current interest in immunologic research, she is broadly interested in many of the pulmonary diseases that arise in the human population. Surprisingly, the Salt Lake City valley in Utah is one of the most polluted areas in the country, therefore pulmonary exacerbations occur frequently and decrease the quality of life for many individuals in this area. Altogether she believes that research completed understanding the interactions between the pulmonary system and immune system in humans will lead to more effective therapeutics for these patients.

Collection Overview

The lung is a complex organ that is both highly vascularized and constantly exposed to the external environment during normal inhalation. In one breath, a host may be exposed to several million pathogenic and non-pathogenic particles that vary in size from 20 nM (small viruses) to 10 uM (air pollutants). Depending on the size of the inhaled particle, deposition can occur in the large airways down to the alveoli. The immune response begins when inhaled particles interact with innate receptors (e.g. toll-like receptors) on the lung parenchymal cells, which initiates the immune response through the production of innate cytokines and chemokines. These inflammatory mediators activate neutrophils, macrophages, dendritic cells, and the recently defined, innate lymphoid cells (ILC2). Innate immune cells facilitate the removal of particles, or if necessary prime and activate T and B cells in the case of lung infections. Generally, adaptive immunity takes anywhere from 5 days to weeks to program, and in part becomes dysregulated in chronic inflammatory lung disorders. As pulmonary research progresses, there is a growing need for basic research for illness such as COPD and asthma (among others) as the incidence of these disorders is still increasing. In this collection, we will present a number of methods designed to advance future pulmonary studies. The topics that will be covered in this collection include: (1) animal models of pulmonary disorders, (2) ex vivo techniques for studying pulmonary cells