Editorial Editorial : Experimental models of asthma

Since 2002, a workshop entitled “Asthma in animal models” has been held once a year in Hannover, Germany. It is organized by the Fraunhofer Institute of Toxicology and Experimental Medicine in collaboration with the collaborative research centre “Sonderforschungsbereich” 587, “Immune reactions of the lung in infection and allergy” (Hannover Medical School). The aim of these meetings is an intense scientific exchange between researchers and clinicians coming from academic or industrial background. Over the years the topics within the extensive field of asthma and COPD have ranged from methodological aspects to the influence of infections and environmental factors up to perspectives in the development of new therapeutic strategies. Editorial In January 2007, the 6th workshop took place with the main topics “Interaction of resident lung cells with inflammation in asthma and COPD”, “Infection and Asthma” and “New therapeutic Targets against Asthma”. The workshop was organized by the Fraunhofer Institute of Toxicology and Experimental Medicine in collaboration with the collaborative research centre “Sonderforschungsbereich” 587, “Immune reactions of the lung in infection and allergy” (Hannover Medical School). Some particularly interesting contributions to the workshop were selected to be published in this supplement to Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology since inflammatory airway diseases are of major interest for the research areas covered by the journal [1-9]. Bronchial asthma is a respiratory disease characterized by chronic inflammation and episodes or attacks of airway narrowing. The burden from asthma in western societies has increased over the past decades, but the precise reasons for this increase remain enigmatic so far. In addition, the exact physiological mechanisms of the development of asthma, in particular the complex interaction of chronic inflammation with resident lung cells such as smooth muscle cells, fibroblasts or neurons are still unknown. To understand the disease and subsequently develop new and effective drugs, the use of predictive animal models is essential. Since several newly developed highly specific anti-inflammatory drugs were very effective in murine from 6th Workshop on Animal Models of Asthma Hannover, Germany. 19-20 January 2007 Published: 27 February 2008 Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology 2008, 3(Suppl 1):S1 doi:10.1186/1745-6673-3-S1-S1 Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Animal Models of Asthma Armin Braun, Thomas Tschernig and David A Groneberg Publication of this supplement was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG SFB 587) and Fraunhofer Institute of Toxicology and Experimental Medicine. Reviews and Research This article is available from: http://www.occup-med.com/content/3/S1/S1 © 2008 Braun et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.