Macrophages play key roles in tissue homeostasis, defense, disease and repair. The origins of macrophages are established during embryogenesis. Macrophages are highly plastic and exhibit distinct functional phenotypes based on micro-environmental stimuli. Macrophage phenotypes with specific functional profiles, their lineage relation and the related macrophage mediators driving resolution and repair mechanisms in infection (Virus and/or bacteria) induced lung injury are not well understood. Therefore, there is an urgent need to investigate these mechanisms that could throw lights to develop the therapeutic strategies to treat these conditions more efficiently. Several cell-based therapies have shown promising results in the past. Macrophages are a key cell types in the immune cell compartment, that being involved in various biological processes. The high plasticity and diverse functional role of macrophages mark them as the potential targets to investigate for efficiency directly or indirectly via their expressed/released mediators to treat infectious diseases. The overall objective of this special issue is to enhance the understanding of macrophage phenotype switch in infection induced injury/repair and to provide evidences on macrophage-released or -expressed mediators from their distinct functional phenotypes, could lead to the identification of key phenotype modulators and/or their potential candidates that could be developed for the treating infectious diseases.

This special issue will focus on articles that evaluate and demonstrate the role of macrophages and their phenotypes in injury and repair mechanisms in an infectious diseases context with help of studies based on in vitro, in vivo, ex vivo and animal models. The manuscripts that demonstrate the areas such as, infectious diseases, macrophage cell therapy, injury, repair, advanced therapeutic strategies using macrophages, etc are encouraged to be submitted for this special issue.

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