image: 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. In the current study, when researchers applied the cancer drug IL-2, fluid from the bottom of the chip entered the air channel on the top, and the blood clotted—mimicking what happens when humans get pulmonary edema. Further, when they turned on the vacuum to simulate breathing, the fluid leakage was much worse—adding new insight to what scientists understand about this life-threatening condition. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the November 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: Image courtesy of Wyss Institute