A Living, Breathing Lung-on-a-Chip

Human cells can be grown outside the human body. In a petri dish, they may develop in ways that resemble the cells inside the body. But their function and activity are limited. For example, in a dish, lung cells are just lung cells. They don’t breathe.

Using new technology, however, researchers have put lung cells on a chip. The cells on a chip have suddenly become a lung-on-a-chip, active, moving, and breathing.

In a paper published in the in the November 7 issue of Science Translational Medicine, researchers report on their use of recently-developed organ-on-a-chip technology. They describe how they built and used "a biomimetic microdevice that reconstitutes organ-level lung functions to create a human disease model-on-a-chip."

Caption: Wyss Institute's human breathing lung-on-a-chip. Credit: Wyss Institute, Harvard University. Usage Restrictions: None.

Already the device has led to two discoveries directly applicable to the lung disease, edema, which is a major concern for some cancer patients. First, development of the disease is accelerated by the physical movement of the lungs. This is "something that clinicians and scientists never suspected before," according to Donald Ingber, senior author of the study.

Second, researchers identified one drug, currently under development, that might help prevent the problem. For Ingber, this is the main attraction of organ-on-a-chip technology. "This on-chip model of human pulmonary edema can be used to identify new potential therapeutic agents in vitro," Ingber says.

This could accelerate the speed of drug development and testing while reducing the cost. The main advantage is that an organ-on-a-chip gives researchers the opportunity to test a wide array of potential drug compounds. Tests can be run not just on nonhuman animals or on cultured human cells but on functioning or working small-scale models of human organs.

Beyond its value in pharmaceutical research, it is not clear where this research may lead, but it is one more way in which the boundary we once drew between the living and the nonliving is being erased, along with the line between the natural and the artifical.

The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. The paper is entitled "A Human Disease Model of Drug Toxicity–Induced Pulmonary Edema in a Lung-on-a-Chip Microdevice" and appears in the November 7, 2012 issue of Science Translational Medicine.