Dorrello Lab

In Valerio Dorrello's clinical duties in the pediatric critical care unit, one of the most devastating and common injuries he comes across is severe, progressive lung injury. Despite current medical treatments, many of his young patients progress to chronic respiratory failure, leaving lung transplantation as the only definitive treatment. What represents a daily clinical challenge – making these patients better – has become his research passion: to find a therapeutic strategy to repair lungs early, before irreversible changes occur. He has recently succeeded in developing an airway-specific method to efficiently remove only the lung epithelium (de-epithelialization) while preserving lung vasculature and architecture in a rodent model. This new functional, vascularized lung graft then enabled the attachment and engraftment of lung epithelial progenitors ex vivo. The overriding goal of Dr. Dorrello’s laboratory is to develop novel strategies to target and replace only the injured or defective epithelial cells of the lung to promote lung repair and restore lung function, while keeping the surrounding lung architecture and vasculature intact.