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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.