Our research is examining chronic lung allograft dysfunction after lung transplantation. When you transplant a lung, over half the patients will develop fibrous obliteration or abnormalities of the airway. Understanding this is really the key to understanding long-term survival after lung transplantation.
The importance of this model of intrapulmonary tracheal transplant is that the transplanted trachea is placed into the environment of the lung itself, and therefore you can look at an allograft versus an Isograft in terms of its response after a transplant. Most fascinating is the fact that an Isograft, even though it's had the same ischemia and the same injury, completely recovers and has normal anatomy, but an allograft develops fibrous obliteration, and understanding why that happens in an allograft is the key to understanding the underlying mechanisms of fibrosis in lung transplantation.
