Application of iPSC to Modelling of Respiratory Diseases

Respiratory disease is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality world-wide with an increasing incidence as the aged population prevails. Many lung diseases are treated for symptomatic relief, with no cure available, indicating a critical need for novel therapeutic strategies. Such advances are hampered by a lack of understanding of how human lung pathologies initiate and progress. Research on human lung disease relies on the isolation of primary cells from explanted lungs or the use of immortalized cells, both are limited in their capacity to represent the genomic and phenotypic variability among the population. In an era where we are progressing toward precision medicine the use of patient specific induced pluripotent cells (iPSC) to generate models, where sufficient primary cells and tissues are scarce, has increased our capacity to understand human lung pathophysiology. Directed differentiation of iPSC toward lung presented the initial challenge to overcome in generating iPSC-derived lung epithelial cells. Since then major advances have been made in defining protocols to specify and isolate specific lung lineages, with the generation of airway spheroids and multi cellular organoids now possible. This technological advance has opened up our capacity for human lung research and prospects for autologous cell therapy. This chapter will focus on the application of iPSC to studying human lung disease.