Airway epithelium in obliterative airway disease

Lung transplantation is currently the only available treatment for endstage
lung disease patients. Despite the success of improved modern
lung transplantation with the introduction of new surgical techniques,
improved immunosuppressive agents and innovations in managing of
acute rejection and infection, the survival rate of recipients is 75% at 1
year and less than 50% at 5 years. (1) One of the most severe
complications after lung transplantation is obliterative bronchiolitis (OB)
which affect over 40% of the recipients within 5 years during the posttransplantation
period.(1).
OB is a chronic disease that develops from months and mostly
years after lung transplantation (2-4). It is characterized by
progressive bronchial inflammation, epithelial injury and luminal
fibrosis.(5-7). There is no treatment for human OB and insight into the
understandings of its mechanism is still lacking. Presently, all clinical
efforts are directed at slowing down the process. These efforts include
pre-transplant treatment to the donor lung to reduce inflammatory
inducing factors, employment of aggressive peri-transplant
administration with antibiotics (3;8-11) and improved
immunosuppressive regimens. Only re-transplantation appears to be
a curable solution, but is mostly not possible due to the limited
availability of donor organs. Clinical investigation of OB in humans is
restricted by the limited amount of patient material available for
research. This makes the development of new treatments a difficult
and time consuming task (12). Thus, a simple animal model that
resembles the development of OB in human is a desirable goal.

	Title and contents
	Chapter 1
	Chapter 2
	Chapter 3
	Chapter 4
	Chapter 5
	Chapter 6
	Chapter 7
	Chapter 8 (Dutch summary)
	Chapter 9 (Chinese summary)
	Acknowledgements
	Curriculum vitae
	Complete thesis

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