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For the first time, scientists have been able to transform human stem cells into a fully functional lung and airway cells.

This discovery opens up a potential for modelling lung disease and developing screening drugs.

“Researchers have had relative success in turning human stem cells into heart cells, pancreatic beta cells, intestinal cells, liver cells, and nerve cells, raising all sorts of possibilities for regenerative medicine,” said study leader Hans-Willem Snoeck of Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) in a press release.

“Now, we are finally able to make lung and airway cells. This is important because lung transplants have a particularly poor prognosis,” said Snoeck, professor of medicine (in microbiology & immunology) and affiliated with the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology and the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative.

“Although any clinical application is still many years away, we can begin thinking about making autologous lung transplants - that is, transplants that use a patient’s own skin cells to generate functional lung tissue,” Snoeck added.

Previous researches by Dr. Snoeck’s have revealed about a set of chemical factors that turn human embryonic stem cells into precursors of lung as well as airway cells.

The iPS cells or human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) closely resemble embryonic stem cells. On the contrary these were generated from skin cells.

The researchers have also claimed that the findings have implications for diseases like idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). In IPF, the type 2 cells are believed to play central part.

“No one knows what causes the disease, and there’s no way to treat it,” said Snoeck in the press release.

“Using this technology, researchers will finally be able to create laboratory models of IPF, study the disease at the molecular level, and screen drugs for possible treatments or cures,”.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.