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“BPD has transformed its policies and procedures related to transportation … so that today, the department can meet the standards required for the safe transportation of persons in custody,” the city’s acting solicitor, Ebony Thompson, said during a Wednesday news conference.

This was validated in human disease as preterm infants with more severe BPD had increased plasma G-CSF.

Professor Hibbs concludes, "Our studies identify a new mechanism in BPD that is therapeutically tractable and may help rescue the lungs and sight of infants from life-long damage. Neonatal lung and eye diseases are currently managed and treated as independent conditions. However, our findings suggest that G-CSF is a pathological mechanism common to both, which may advance a new therapeutic strategy to improve the care and long-term outcomes of these vulnerable premature infants."

Professor Hibbs notes, "Inflammation is highly implicated in the pathogenesis of BPD, so we speculated that G-CSF-dependent inflammation might be involved in this lung disease, but the surprise was that deficiency of G-CSF also protected against retinopathy. While more needs to be done to expand these findings, recent studies implicate neutrophils in ocular diseases such as ROP and diabetic retinopathy, and G-CSF is the major regulator of neutrophil development survival and activation."

First author Lakshanie C. Wickramasinghe, PhD, Department of Immunology, Central Clinical School, Monash University, adds: "These studies highlight the value of collaborative research -- we could not have achieved the best research outcomes without involving clinical collaborators, Professor Atul Malhotra, who provided a first-hand look into the respiratory interventions provided in the neonatal intensive care unit; and Professor Anne Hilgendorff and Dr. Alida Kindt, who performed translational studies in BPD patients demonstrating significantly elevated levels of G-CSF in infants with more severe BPD."