For someone with a severe, incurable lung disorder such as cystic fibrosis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung transplant might be the only chance for survival. Unfortunately, matching donor lungs are rare. One solution may the use of stem cells to grow lung tissue. Specialists in the field of tissue engineering have been frustrated by the problem of coaxing undifferentiated stem cells to develop into the specific cell types that populate different locations in the lung. Now, researchers at UTMB have demonstrated a potentially revolutionary solution to this problem.