Macrophages Tell the Non-Professionals What to Do.

Phagocytosis by professional and non-professional phagocytes plays a critical role in tissue homeostasis and the immune response. Using an airway inflammation model, Han et al. (2016) report in Nature that macrophages secrete IGF-1 to signal epithelial cells to stop ingesting apoptotic cells while increasing the uptake of anti-inflammatory macrophage-derived microvesicles.