Smoking is one of the leading causes of preventable death not just in the US, but worldwide. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tobacco causes an estimated seven million deaths around the world, every single year. And for every person who dies, another 30 live with a serious smoking-related illness. Clearly quitting is a good idea. Now a new study adds even more incentive to do just that.

Scientists at the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute and University College London in the UK, found that quitting smoking did more than just stop further damage to the lungs. They found that cells in the lining of the lungs that were able to avoid being damaged, were able to regrow and repopulate the lung, helping repair damaged areas.

In an article in Science Daily Dr Peter Campbell, a joint senior author of the study, said: “People who have smoked heavily for 30, 40 or more years often say to me that it’s too late to stop smoking — the damage is already done. What is so exciting about our study is that it shows that it’s never too late to quit — some of the people in our study had smoked more than 15,000 packs of cigarettes over their life, but within a few years of quitting many of the cells lining their airways showed no evidence of damage from tobacco.”

The study is published in the journal Nature.

Researchers at UCLA have also made a discovery that could help people with lung disease.

They examined the lungs of people with cancer and compared them to the lungs of healthy people. They were able to identify a group of molecules, called the Wnt/beta-catenin signaling pathway, that appear to influence the activity of stem cells that are key to maintaining healthy lungs. Too much activity can tilt the balance away from healthy lungs to ones with mutations that are more prone to developing tumors.

In a news release Dr. Brigitte Gomperts, the lead author of the study, says although this work has only been done in mice so far it has tremendous potential: “We think this could help us develop a new therapy that promotes airway health. This could not only inform the treatment of lung cancer, but help prevent its progression in the first place.”

The study is published in the journal Cell Reports.

CIRM has funded some of Dr. Gomperts earlier work in this area.

And there’s encouraging news for people trying to recover from a stroke. Results from ReNeuron’s Phase 2 clinical trial show the therapy appears to help people who have experienced some level of disability following a stroke.

ReNeuron says its CTX therapy – made from neural stem cells – was given to 23 people who had moderate to severe disability resulting from an ischemic stroke. The patients were, on average, seven months post stroke.

In the study, published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, researchers used the Modified Rankin Scale (mRS), a measure of disability and dependence to assess the impact of the therapy. The biggest improvements were seen in a group of 14 patients who had limited movement of one arm.

• 38.5% experienced at least a one-point improvement on mRS six months after being treated.
• 50% experienced a one-point improvement 12 months after being treated.

If that doesn’t seem like a big improvement, then consider this. Moving from an mRS 3 to 2 means that a person with a stroke regains their ability to live independently.

The therapy is now being tested in a larger patient group in the PISCES III clinical trial.