Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a groundbreaking “lung-on-a-chip” device that includes a functional immune system. This innovation allows for the observation of how lungs respond to threats, inflammation, and healing in a way that closely mimics living human lungs, marking a significant step beyond previous models.
The new lung-on-a-chip is a pliable polymer chip containing microscopic channels lined with living human cells, designed to simulate the behavior of a human lung. A key advancement is the integration of a working immune system into the chip, a component previously missing in organ-on-a-chip models.
This allows researchers to observe immune cells circulating and responding to threats, such as a severe influenza virus infection, with remarkable accuracy. The model has demonstrated the ability to replicate immune cell migration, inflammation spread, and defense activation, providing insights into disease progression and the effectiveness of antiviral treatments.
This technology offers a more accurate preclinical research tool compared to traditional animal models, which often do not replicate human responses to lung diseases like asthma. The research team believes the platform can be expanded to study various lung conditions including asthma, cystic fibrosis, lung cancer, and tuberculosis.
The long-term vision includes developing personalized medicine by creating chips from individual patient cells to predict treatment efficacy, although this requires further scaling and validation. This work, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, was supported by Wellcome Leap and the National Institutes of Health, among others.
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