Dustin C Bagley, Tobias Russell, Elena Ortiz-Zapater, Sally Stinson, Kristina Fox, Polly F Redd, Merry Joseph, Cassandra Deering-Rice, Christopher Reilly, Maddy Parsons, Christopher Brightling, Jody Rosenblatt
Asthma is deemed an inflammatory disease, yet the defining diagnostic feature is mechanical bronchoconstriction. We previously discovered a conserved process called cell extrusion that drives homeostatic epithelial cell death when cells become too crowded. In this work, we show that the pathological crowding of a bronchoconstrictive attack causes so much epithelial cell extrusion that it damages the airways, resulting in inflammation and mucus secretion in both mice and humans. Although relaxing the airways with the rescue treatment albuterol did not affect these responses, inhibiting live cell extrusion signaling during bronchoconstriction prevented all these features...
April 5, 2024: Science