About the Authors

Nobukazu Suganuma

Contributed equally to this work with: Nobukazu Suganuma, Satoru Ito

Affiliation Department of Respiratory Medicine, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya, Japan

Satoru Ito

Contributed equally to this work with: Nobukazu Suganuma, Satoru Ito

itori@med.nagoya-u.ac.jp

Affiliation Department of Respiratory Medicine, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya, Japan

Hiromichi Aso

Affiliation Department of Respiratory Medicine, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya, Japan

Masashi Kondo

Affiliation Department of Respiratory Medicine, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya, Japan

Mitsuo Sato

Affiliation Department of Respiratory Medicine, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya, Japan

Masahiro Sokabe

Affiliation Department of Physiology, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya, Japan

Yoshinori Hasegawa

Affiliation Department of Respiratory Medicine, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya, Japan

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: SI YH. Performed the experiments: NS SI HA MK M. Sato. Analyzed the data: NS SI. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: NS SI MK M. Sato. Wrote the paper: NS SI M. Sokabe.