ORGAN-ON-A-CHIP MODEL OF PULMONARY ARTERIAL CELL-CELL INTERACTIONS

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Blood vessels in the lung regulate access of blood to oxygen and their proper function is important to sustain life. Diseases that affect lung blood vessels remain incurable because animal physiology is different from human and there are no good models of human blood vessels to experiment on so new drug candidates fail in clinical trials.We have made an organ-on-a-chip model of small human lung artery using 2 cell types, endothelial and smooth muscle cells which gained interest of pharmaceutical industry. However, blood vessels contain many other cell types which interact with each other to regulate blood vessel function and the model needs to be improved to better reflect physiology of a real blood vessel and allow observation of long-term processes such as blood vessel growth or remodelling. We aim to improve the physiological relevance of our model, by introducing other pulmonary vascular cell types and optimising the device for studying new blood vessel formation and observations of cell behaviour over longer periods of time. The project, if successful, will provide a new way of studying lung blood vessel physiology in health and disease, establish human donor-specific models and reduce animal modelling of human lung diseases such as pulmonary hypertension, acute lung injury or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The device can be easily made, is cheap and scalable and would be a benefit to basic science institutions as well as pharmaceutical industry.