New Advanced Engineering Tools for Investigating Lung Injury and Repair

PROJECT NARRATIVE Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a fatal disease characterized by progressive scarring and distortion of the alveolar architecture and a reduction in alveolar function. In order to identify therapeutic targets for IPF, new approaches are needed to understand the step-by-step cellular and molecular events that control alveolar regeneration and how this goes awry in the disease setting. This proposal combines two teams with extensive expertise in bioengineering, optics, in vivo lung imaging, IPF, and molecular and cellular biology to develop two new approaches to visualize and perturb key cellular events in the alveolar niche over extended periods of time in order to understand how their dynamic behavior contributes to aveolar repair in the context of IPF.