Modifying macrophages in the lung could head off pulmonary hypertension

In the 1980s, when Stella Kourembanas, MD, began her career in neonatology, she cared for newborns with pulmonary hypertension, a disease that results in abnormally high blood pressure in the lung arteries and can lead to heart failure. Since then, treatments like inhaled nitric oxide, new vasodilators, new modalities of mechanical ventilation, and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) have reduced mortality from about 85% to 10%. But pulmonary hypertension still persists.