Small Airway-on-a-Chip: Modeling Lung Inflammatory Diseases and Asthma

A research team at Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has leveraged its organ-on-a-chip technology to develop a model of the human small airway in which lung inflammatory diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the third leading cause of mortality worldwide, and asthma can be studied outside the human body. Demand for such opportunities is especially high since small airway inflammation cannot be adequately studied in human patients or animal models and, to date, there are no effective therapies that can stop or reverse the complex and widespread inflammation-driven processes. The platform allows researchers to gain new insights into the disease mechanisms, identify novel biomarkers, and test new drug candidates.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] development of new Therapeutics for chronic disease of the lung such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD have been hindered by the inability to study them in vitro to address this challenge Vis Institute researchers use their organ on a chip technology to produce a microfluidic human lung small Airway on

00:00:22 a chip the device which is composed of clear rubber material has two Hollow channels separated by a porous membrane that is lined by living human lungs small Airway cells on one side and capillary blood vessel cells on the other much like the living lung in the device air flows over the top of the human lung cells and liquid medium containing white blood cells flow below

00:00:44 the capillary cell layer in the airway chip the lung cells have hairlike cyia that move rhythmically helping the mucus flow out of the lung chip just as they do in the living lung Beast researchers have also been able to align the chip with diseased cells from coop PD patients and these chips retain the features of the patient's lung with the disease

00:01:05 including an increased ability to become inflamed when exposed to viral or bacterial pathogens and when inflammation is triggered in the chip white blood cells flowing in the blood channel are stimulated to adhere to the inflamed capillary blood vessel wall as they do in the human body using this disease model researchers have identified new lung

00:01:25 disease biomarkers and demonstrated that the model can be used to test for new drugs for COPD d as well as asthma