EDITORIAL

We are very pleased to welcome two New Associate Editors to our team. Associate Professor David Feller-Kopman of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, USA and Associate Professor Peter Black of the University of Auckland, New Zealand who both started in February. David is the Director of Interventional Pulmonology and Associate Professor of Medicine of the Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, USA. His clinical interests are in complex central airway disease, tracheobronchomalacia, lung cancer, pleural disease and critical care medicine and his research interests are in improving the multidisciplinary treatment of patients with complex airway disease, investigating the physiology and pathophysiology of non-malignant central airway obstruction and pleural disease as well as developing novel methods to teach procedural skills. He has published extensively on these topics. Peter is Associate Professor at the Department of Pharmacology and Clinical Pharmacology of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research interests are in the study of the pathogenesis and treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with a special interest in airway remodeling and factors influencing the growth of cultured airway smooth muscle cells. His clinical studies have focused on novel treatments for asthma and strategies for treating breathlessness in patients with COPD. He has published extensively on these topics. We are looking forward to their contribution to the Journal. The first highlight of this issue is the invited Editorial “Deconstructing COPD using genomic tools” from one of our Associate Editors, Dr Ian Yang, and his colleague Dr Savarimuthu Francis of the Department of Thoracic Medicine at The Prince Charles Hospital, and the School of Medicine at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. These authors address the issues of susceptibility to COPD and progression of the disease. The advances in this field are reviewed and the new developments in screening and predictive tools are discussed. In this issue, we present the second ‘Year-in-review’ paper, highlighting important findings in respiratory medicine from articles published in Respirology in 2008. This review paper by Dr Ian Yang and Dr Martin Kolb, two of our Associate Editors, looks back at the basic science publications in Respirology in 2008. Our review series on infectious diseases is continued in this issue with the review by Dr Michael S. Niederman, Chairman at the Department of Medicine of the Winthrop University Hospital, Mineola, New York, USA, with the self-explanatory title: “Making sense of scoring systems in community acquired pneumonia”. In this issue, we are pleased to publish the first of an occasional review series on air pollution and lung health. This review, “Pulmonary and systemic response to atmospheric pollution” by Professor James Hogg and Dr Stephen Van Eeden of St Pauls Hospital, Vancouver, Canada explains the reaction of the organism to air pollution at both local and systemic levels and reflects on the implications of these mechanisms on general health across the population. The original article entitled “TGF-β effects on airway smooth muscle cell proliferation, VEGF release and signal transduction pathways” by Dr Shin and colleagues investigated the effect of TGF-β on airway smooth muscle cell remodeling and VEGF release and discusses the signaling pathway possibly implicated in the effect observed. In “Clinicopathological features and epidermal growth factor receptor mutations associated with epithelial-mesenchymal transition in non-small cell lung cancer”, Dr Deng and colleagues hoped to find a cellular maker to identify patients likely to respond to EGFR targeted lung-cancer treatments. In “Varenicline for smoking cessation: A placebo-controlled, randomized study”, Dr Wang and colleagues reported the results of a placebo controlled study of the effect of the novel smoking cessation drug varenicline. In “Evaluation of transcutaneous CO2 responses following acute changes in PaCO2 in healthy subjects” Dr Fuke and colleagues examined the inter- and intra-variability of measurements of transcutaneous CO2 in healthy subjects breathing mixed gases of various CO2 partial pressure. The implication of the results in medical practice are discussed. I hope you enjoy this issue of Respirology.

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