Acute and chronic lung injury represents a major and growing global burden of disease. For many of these lung diseases, the damage is irreparable, exhausting the host's ability to regenerate new lung, and current therapies are simply supportive rather than restorative. Cell-based therapies offer the promise of tissue regeneration for many organs.

In this paper, we examine the potential application of amnion epithelial cells, derived from the term placenta, to lung regeneration. We discuss their unique properties of plasticity and immunomodulation, reviewing the experimental evidence that amnion epithelial cells can prevent and repair lung injury, offering the potential to be applied to both neonatal, childhood, and adult lung disease. It is amazing to suggest that the placenta may offer renewed life after birth as well as securing new life before.

As one of the most prevalent chronic disorders, airway disease is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. In order to understand its underlying mechanisms and to enable assessment of therapeutic efficacy of a variety of possible interventions, noninvasive investigation of the airways in a large number of subjects is of great research interest.

Due to its high resolution in temporal and spatial domains, computed tomography (CT) has been widely used in clinical practices for studying the normal and abnormal manifestations of lung diseases, albeit there is a need to clearly demonstrate the benefits in light of the cost and radiation dose associated with CT examinations performed for the purpose of airway analysis. Whereas a single CT examination consists of a large number of images, manually identifying airway morphological characteristics and computing features to enable thorough investigations of airway and other lung diseases is very time-consuming and susceptible to errors. Hence, automated and semiautomated computerized analysis of human airways is becoming an important research area in medical imaging. A number of computerized techniques have been developed to date for the analysis of lung airways.

In this review, we present a summary of the primary methods developed for computerized analysis of human airways, including airway segmentation, airway labeling, and airway morphometry, as well as a number of computer-aided clinical applications, such as virtual bronchoscopy. Both successes and underlying limitations of these approaches are discussed, while highlighting areas that may require additional work.

Smooth muscle comprises a key functional component of both the airways and their supporting vasculature. Dysfunction of smooth muscle contributes to and exacerbates a host of breathing-associated pathologies such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pulmonary hypertension.

These diseases may be marked by airway and/or vascular smooth muscle hypertrophy, proliferation and hyper-reactivity, and related conditions such as fibrosis and extracellular matrix remodeling. This review will focus on the contribution of airway or vascular smooth dysfunction to common airway diseases.

Allergic inflammation develops in tissues that have large epithelial surface areas that are exposed to the environment, such as the lung, skin and gut. In the steady state, antigen-experienced memory T cells patrol these peripheral tissues to facilitate swift immune responses against invading pathogens. In at least two allergy-prone organs, the skin and the gut, memory T cells are programmed during the initial antigen priming to express trafficking receptors that enable them to preferentially home to these organs.

In this review we propose that tissue-specific memory and inflammation-specific T cell trafficking facilitates the development of allergic disease in these organs. We thus review recent advances in our understanding of tissue-specific T cell trafficking and how regulation of T cell trafficking by the chemokine system contributes to allergic inflammation in mouse models and in human allergic diseases of the skin, lung and gut. Inflammation- and tissue-specific T lymphocyte trafficking pathways are currently being targeted as new treatments for non-allergic inflammatory diseases and may yield effective new therapeutics for allergic diseases.