Airway epithelial repair: breathtakingly quick and multipotentially pathogenic.

Epithelial shedding, even to the point of airway denudation, had already been described as a common and unifying feature of asthma by the latter half of the 19th century. However, the repair processes that specifically follow the shedding-like loss of epithelial cells have only recently been examined in vivo. This paper discusses the exceedingly fast epithelial restitution and the potential pathogenic sequelae to epithelial shedding alone that have been unravelled. Epithelial cytoprotection emerges as an important property of future therapeutic drugs for the treatment of airways inflammatory conditions.