New ideas in lung regeneration: a personal view from Estoril

10th ERS Lung Science Conference--rebuilding a diseased lung: repair and regeneration Estoril, Portugal, 30 March-1 April 2012 The 10th ERS Lung Science Conference, held in Estoril, Portugal, focused on rebuilding a diseased lung: repair and regeneration, seeking to understand, with some amount of precision, how the processes by which the vastly complex self-assembling, self-repairing machine that is a human lung actually develops from a few cells in the embryo, repairs itself or fails to and succumbs to disease. Thus, the major research themes focused on lung development, lung stem and progenitor cell populations, regenerative signaling mechanisms and tissue engineering and transplantation.