Smoking Lung-on-a-Chip to Study Effects of Nicotine and Tobacco

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Scanning electron microscopy image showing the mature morphology of the human bronchiolar epithelium with multiple long mucus-transporting cilia protruding into the lumen of the air-filled microchannel of the chip that is connected to the smoking instrument. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

At Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, researchers built a device that reproduces a human lung to study the effects of smoking. It looks like this technology is built to smoke so you don’t have to, but joking aside, behind the intake where the cigarettes are positioned is a chip with living human small airway cells. These can be harvested from healthy volunteers or COPD patients, for example, and compared to identify why exactly smoking aggravates symptoms of COPD so drastically.
The entire device can closely mimic the habits of smokers, inhaling and exhaling at different pressures and rates, and exposing the living tissue within a microfluidic chip, much as it would be in a real lung. The lung cells can survive inside the chip for up to a month, being fed via a special membrane that allows nutrients to pass into the cells while keeping the cells exposed to the smokey air.
“We identified a COPD-specific signature by comparing gene expression changes in COPD-derived chips exposed or not exposed to smoke and subtracting the changes that we see in chips made from healthy lung chips. This type of analysis could lead to future biomarkers, drug targets and possibly more personalized approaches to COPD in the future,” said first author Kambez H. Benam, Ph.D., a Wyss Institute Technology Development Fellow, in a press release.

see video showing off the smoking lung-on-a-chip



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