This "lung-on-a-chip" uses electricity to "breathe" and could end the need for animal testing for lung diseases.
Testing new drugs for COPD (smoker's lung) usually requires using mice or rats, which often don't react the same way humans do. Researchers created a 3D-printed human airway that lives on a microfluidic chip and uses potassium-sensing sensors to watch the cells react to drugs in real-time. It’s like having a tiny, living human lung that can tell a computer exactly how it's feeling. This practical magic could speed up drug discovery for millions of COPD sufferers and finally move us away from using animals as stand-ins for human lungs. It turns a biological process into a high-speed electronic readout.
A microfluidic potassium ion-sensing chip platform incorporating PulmoForge X, a UV-cured biomimetic airway construct based on functionalized human 3D COPD spheroids, for GPCR-targeted natural product screening and efficacy evaluation
SSRN · 6575062
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) represents a major public health challenge. G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) represent a promising yet underexploited class of therapeutic targets for COPD. However, the lack of robust biological models and high-throughput screening tools capable of rapidly evaluating drug-induced GPCR activity has substantially hindered the development of GPCR-targeted therapies. Here, we report an integrated microphysiological platform for rapid and functionally