Featured Researcher: Thomas Lynch, PhD

Read on to learn more about Dr. Lynch’s work and research career.

How/why did you decide to pursue a career in your field? 

I’ve always been a curious person. I was that kid who annoyed people with all the questions. I can’t turn it off. Personality-wise, research suits me well. I like being creative, and research supports this, as there are many open questions in lung health and pediatrics. Questions need researchers and the right tools to answer them.

I hadn’t worked in pediatrics before I came to Nationwide Children’s, so I was a bit intimidated by switching fields. I previously focused on tissue-specific stem cells in the lung, lung transplantation and cystic fibrosis in adults. An interesting way to think about it, as expressed to me by Dr. Dennis Durbin, is that pediatric health is adult health. Meaning the hope is that these pediatric patients grow up and have adult lungs. Collaborating with my colleagues here at Nationwide Children’s, I started to think about what events and factors might influence lifelong health. We have the opportunity to intervene early on in a patient’s life and set them up to maximize their lung health. I’m excited to be working in that capacity.

What’s next? What do you hope to accomplish in your research and professional development going forward? 

I’m highly interested in these structures called submucosal glands. All along the airways, you have special epithelial cells that produce fluids and antibacterial proteins to humidify the air and detoxify or remove particles. That’s the surface airway epithelium, and beneath that, you have the mucosa and the submucosa. Within that structure, in human airways, are these epithelial cells that make up glands with tubules and acini.

Imagine a bunch of grapes; that’s the structure of these gland cells in the airways — they exist throughout the airways that have cartilage in human lungs. These glands are interesting because they produce numerous types of fluids that are necessary in conditioning the conducting airways, keeping particles out, killing bacteria, or preventing bacterial overgrowth, and they have a specialized function compared to the surface of airway epithelium. So, you have these two epithelial compartments separated by this sea of non-epithelial cells. I noticed as a graduate student that if you injure a lung with a chemical in a mouse, for example, if you get a severe enough injury, there are stem cells in the glands that can contribute to the regeneration of the surface airway epithelium — we call it reserve regeneration because it’s a kind of back up regeneration if the stem cells in the surface are lost or overwhelmed. It’s like a safety net.

Now, I’m interested in this non-preferred mode of regeneration and the potential consequences of over-reliance on this pathway, for example, chronic injury, chronic inflammation, lifelong smoking, or maybe an injury at a stage of life where these compartments aren’t fully mature yet.

So, we ask if this “reserve” mode of regeneration is engaged differently by specific types of injuries, insults, infections or if it is more affected by the overall level of injury? And then how can this mode of regeneration potentially be a cause of what we consider dysfunction or disease? My research is focused on how the submucosal glands are dynamic regenerative structures that respond to myriad stimuli spanning different contexts like cystic fibrosis, lung transplantation, allergic asthma, and even BPD.