Bronchoalveolar Lavage and Lung Tissue Digestion

Bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) is a simple but valuable and typically performed technique commonly used for studying the pathogenesis of lung diseases such as asthma and COPD. Cell counts can be combined with new methods for examining inflammatory responses, such as ELISA, Flow cytometric analysis, immunohistochemistry, quantitative polymerase chain reaction, and HPLC to assess cellular expression for inflammatory cytokines and growth factor. Here we describe a basic procedure to collect BAL fluid and digest lung tissue for assessing a number of pulmonary components.