Airway-on-a-chip could lead to new treatments for cigarette smoke-induced lung injury
Friday, October 28, 2016 - 05:31
in Health & Medicine
Researchers have developed an airway-on-a-chip that supports living small-airway-lining cells from normal or diseased human lungs and an instrument that "breathes" cigarette smoke in and out over these chips. Using this technology, researchers recreated and analyzed the effects of smoking at the molecular, cellular, and tissue level to understand the damage occurring in normal lung and in engineered lung tissues from patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the third leading cause of death in the US.