video: The Wyss Institute’s human breathing lung-on-a-chip, made using human lung and blood vessel cells, acts much like a lung in a human body. A vacuum re-creates the way the lungs physically expand and contract during breathing. Wyss researchers have now mimicked a human disease – pulmonary edema -- on the chip. They applied the cancer drug IL-2, which is known to cause pulmonary edema as a side effect. Pulmonary edema is a potentially fatal condition in which fluid leaks from the bloodstream into the lungs. The researchers first applied IL-2 without the vacuum on, and a small amount of leakage was detected. When they turned the vacuum on to mimic normal physiological breathing motions, however, the fluid leakage was worse—completely filling the air space, as observed in human lungs. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the Nov. 7, 2012, issue of Science Translational Medicine, published by AAAS. The paper, by D. Huh at Harvard University in Boston, Mass., and colleagues was titled, “A Human Disease Model of Drug Toxicity–Induced Pulmonary Edema in a Lung-on-a-Chip Microdevice.” view more
Credit: Video courtesy of Wyss Institute, Harvard University