A Breath of Fresh Air

This webinar features presentations from:

Professor Wojciech Chrzanowski, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney. Accelerating the discovery of new therapeutics for the treatment of lung injuries using patho/physiology mimicking models.

With a surge in Covid-related lung dysfunction and an increase in acute lung injuries due to air pollution a new strategy to regenerate lungs is needed. The progress in the development of new therapeutics is hampered by the lack of reliable lung models that enable rapid, cost-effective and high throughput testing of therapeutics. Animal models are too expensive/slow; cell cultures are too simple.

Professor Chrzanowski will outline the development of advanced human mimicking lung models (aka lung-on-a-chip), which emulate both healthy (for safety studies) and diseased lungs (for therapeutics efficacy). Chrzanowski will discuss the applications of the lung models, their advantages and disadvantages, as well as present future directions of the work.

Dr Emily Richardson, Lead Scientist – Assay Development, CN Bio. The development of alveolar and bronchial human microphysiological systems for use in respiratory infection research and therapeutics evaluation.

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted a need for more physiologically relevant human models that enable us to quickly identify treatments for emerging threats to public health.

Dr Richardson will share the development of two novel primary human lung-on-a-chip models, cultured using the PhysioMimix™ OOC microphysiological system in an open well Transwell^® air-liquid-interface. These distinct bronchial and alveolar in vitro models can be used for a precise understanding of Covid-19 biology and evaluation of therapeutics.

This work was funded by a grant from Innovate UK