Brandon M. Law

TL;DR: Evidence is presented that differentiated airway epithelial cells can revert into stable and functional stem cells in vivo, and this capacity of committed cells to dedifferentiate into stem cells may have a more general role in the regeneration of many tissues and in multiple disease states, notably cancer.

TL;DR: A mode of cell regulation in which adult mammalian stem/progenitor cells relay a forward signal to their own progeny is described, and surprisingly, this forward signal is shown to be necessary for daughter cell maintenance.

TL;DR: It is shown that immediately following injury, discrete subpopulations of p63(+) airway basal stem/progenitor cells themselves express Notch pathway components associated with either secretory or ciliated cell fate commitment, demonstrating that effective airway epithelial regeneration requires intercellular communication within the broader basal stem / progenitor cell population.

TL;DR: Lineage tracing of the ciliated cells of the murine basal cell-containing airway epithelium in conjunction with the ovalbumin (OVA)-induced murine model of allergic lung disease demonstrates that, after OVA challenge, new mucous cells do not originate from ciliated Cells in a pseudostratified basal Cell-containingAirway epit Helium.

TL;DR: A novel approach to activating tet-inducible transgene expression solely in the airway by administering aerosolized doxycycline is described and a suite of preexisting transgenic mice can now be used to study airway biology specifically in cases where transient transGene expression is sufficient to induce a phenotype.