All lung tissue samples were obtained in accordance with Institutional Review Board guidelines at the three sites: Laval University (Quebec, Canada), University of British-Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) and Groningen University (Groningen, The Netherlands). All patients provided written informed consent and the study was approved by the ethics committees of the Institut universitaire de cardiologie et de pneumologie de Québec and the UBC-Providence Health Care Research Institute Ethics Board for Laval and UBC, respectively. The study protocol was consistent with the Research Code of the University Medical Center Groningen and Dutch national ethical and professional guidelines (“Code of conduct; Dutch federation of biomedical scientific societies”; http://www.federa.org).
