PharmaSentry :: Living, Breathing Human Lung-On-a-Chip: A Potential Drug-Testing Alternative

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Article Summary

Living, Breathing Human Lung-On-a-Chip: A Potential Drug-Testing Alternativ..
From Targeted News Service 25-Jun-2010
Because the lung device is translucent, it provides a window into the inner-workings of the human lung without having to invade a living body. With every human breath, air enters the lungs, fills microscopic air sacs called alveoli and transfers oxygen through a thin, flexible, permeable membrane of lung cells into the bloodstream.

Key Concepts
• lungs
• apos
• breathing
• Wyss
• living
• Hospital Boston
• Children
• nanoparticles
• lung-on-a-chip
• absorption
• particles
• beating heart-on-a-chip
• investigators
• Ismagilov
• innovation

Summary

•	Researchers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston have created a device that mimics a living, breathing human lung on a microchip.
•	The device, about the size of a rubber eraser, acts much like a lung in a human body and is made using human lung and blood vessel cells.
•	Because the lung device is translucent, it provides a window into the inner-workings of the human lung without having to invade a living body.
•	It has the potential to be a valuable tool for testing the effects of environmental toxins, absorption of aerosolized therapeutics and the safety and efficacy of new drugs.
•	Such a tool may help accelerate pharmaceutical development by reducing the reliance on current models, in which testing a single substance can cost more than $2 million.
•	"The ability of the lung-on-a-chip device to predict absorption of airborne nanoparticles and mimic the inflammatory response triggered by microbial pathogens, provides proof-of-principle for the concept that organs-on-chips could replace many animal studies in the future," says Donald Ingber, senior author on the study and founding director of Harvard's Wyss Institute.
•	The paper appears in the June 25 issue of Science.
•	Until now, tissue-engineered microsystems have been limited either mechanically or biologically, says Ingber, who is also the Judah Folkman professor of vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston.