Surprising role of lungs in platelet production recently discovered

[SeymourB]

Platelets are not all produced in the marrow - at least in mice:

newatlas.com/lungs-found-ma...

nature.com/nature/journal/v...

I'll be curious to see how this develops for therapies.

[jettyguy]

Lets hope that the human physiology proves to work in a similar fashion as mouse physiology. My question is, if the bone marrow in a human is completely malfunctioning and platelets are mot being produced,would platelets be traveling to the lungs in the first place? And secondly,if human bone marrow is full of CLL B-Cells and is crowding out most,but not all platelets,would platelets still be apt to travel back to the bone marrow from the lung and somehow get the healthy platelets count up? So I am not sure that i am interpreting this properly. Can platelets simply be produced by the lungs,solely by itself, without any bone marrow involvement? Or do the lungs depend on first being seeded by the bone marrow to produce platelets ?

[shoshanaz in reply to jettyguy]

My understanding from what I read was that the lungs are "seeded" with megakaryocytes that originate in the marrow. If I understood correctly, one of the experiments depleted the marrow, then seeded the blood itself, and the lungs then produced the cells. My questions would be: Would increasing lung function through exercise effect even more production (and would aerobic exercise be beneficial in that regard to patients. ) Also, how might this change the approach to bone marrow transplants?

Looks like it might be an important new concept to study.