| Background: Vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) is one of the most important sensory neuropeptides, which comes mainly from non-adrenergic and non-cholinergic nerve fibers. The positive immunoreactivity fibers of VIP widely distribute in airway epithelium, airway smooth muscle, the wall of pulmonary and bronchial blood vessel, and the circumference of sub-mucous gland. The receptors of VIP mainly distribute in pulmonary vascular smooth muscle, airway smooth muscle, airway epithelium, the sub-mucous gland, macrophage, alveoli epithelium and lymphocytes etc. In addition to vasodilatating, VIP has played a vital role in organism's physiological processes such as relaxing airway smooth muscle, reducing the release of inflammation media, eliminating oxygen-derived free radicals and antagonizing cell apoptosis in lung and evidences have being accumulated that its mechanisms are involved in many various biological effects.Bronchial epithelial cells are the target cells of inflammatory and physical stimuli and the structure and function of airway epithelium are damaged more or less in airway hyperresponsiveness diseases such as asthma and bronchitis. It is reported that in the process of wound repair of airway epithelium, the cells around the wound initially get flat, then cells disseminate and migrate to the wound, and then basal cells proliferate and differentiate into ciliated epithelium with the recovery of the epithelium. As an important neuropeptide in lung, there have no papers published about the effects of VIP on wound repair of airway epithelium in structure and function after injury. Therefore, it has significant academic value and clinic application prospect to reveal the effects of VIP on airway homeostasis and to find possible pathway of promoting airway wound repair.Objective: The present study was designed to investigate the effects of VIP on wound repair of airway epithelium and the correspodent signal transduction pathways in the process. |
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