AGER and acute respiratory distress syndrome: A second limitation is that we suggested restored AFC and lung expression of epithelial channels as potential mechanisms for the beneficial effects of RAGE inhibition, but we acknowledge these are only exploratory, hypothesis-generating findings as we did not measure their protein expression in the lung and were unable to precisely characterise the specific pathways by which RAP and sRAGE might alleviate lung injury in ARDS, thus prompting further investigation.