Keep it Together

Picture a perky provincial postman enthusiastically delivering parcels from the edge of town into the centre, not realising that these are unwanted deliveries, amassing in an unhelpful mess. Such is the situation with immune cells from alveoli – the tiny air sacs at the edges of our lungs. Researchers knew they were involved in some way in the development of lung fibrosis, a chronic condition where lung tissue becomes scarred and thickened with excessive connective tissue. So in mice they tracked the disassembly and transport of this material (green), shepherded by the immune cells (red) from the junction between the pleura (a membrane surrounding the lungs) and alveoli towards the deep lungs, where it activated fibroblasts (pink) which prompt fibrosis development. Preventing the disassembly of material where the pleura and alveoli meet reversed fibrosis and regenerated chronically fibrotic lungs, revealing that targeting the pleura could be a new avenue for treatment.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video from work by Adrian Fischer, Wei Han, Shaoping Hu, Martin Mück-Häusl and Juliane Wannemacher, and colleagues
• Institute of Regenerative Biology and Medicine(IRBM), Helmholtz Zentrum München, Munich, Germany
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, January 2025