by John Knox – Stanford Medicine News
If you can imagine the entire population of Fresno, California wiped out, then you can understand what it means to say that more than half a million people will die in the U.S this year from lung cancer. It’s the leading cause of cancer death in this country, and one of the world’s leading fatal diseases.
But Tushar Desai, MD, MPH, professor of pulmonary, allergy & critical care medicine and investigator in the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, is working at the cellular level to lower those numbers. His work involves AT1 cells and AT2 stem cells, the two cell types that line the gas exchange region of the lung, where extremely deadly forms of cancer known as adenocarcinomas form.