CFTR and cystic fibrosis: These findings may be relevant to understand the mechanism of rescue of CFTR-dependent chloride efflux in the nose and rectum of CF mice with the administration of hematopoietic stem cells [42] or mesenchymal stem cells [43] derived from the bone marrow which resulted in modest or rare appearance of stem cell-derived epithelial cells in the lung, suggesting that few stem cells homed to the CF lung may trigger correction of CFTR defects in ion transport via cell-to-cell communications.