A boy clutches his stuffed animal as his mother, Toby Liebowitz, talks about her children's problems with asthma and calls on President Bill Clinton to enact better clean air laws outside the White House in 1997. (File/Jessica Persson/UPI) |
License Photo
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 24 (UPI) -- Testing asthma drugs and treatments is incredibly difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Asthma patients are using largely the same drugs that were being employed 50 years ago -- a testament to the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the current state of asthma-related clinical research.
But a new development by a team of researchers at Harvard University may offer some hope for improvement. Part of the reason asthma research is so difficult is that animal test subjects don't offer a good stand-in for human airways and the conditions of a human asthmatic response.
But a new human airway muscle-on-a-chip, produced in Harvard labs, could help solve that problem by accurately replicating the way smooth muscle contracts in the human windpipe -- both under normal, healthy circumstances and during asthmatic episodes.
The chip is composed of a soft polymer lining mounted on a piece of underlying glass. Atop the polymer are microscale human airway muscles engineered in the lab. Using different proteins, researchers were able to condition the chip to mimic a typical allergic asthma response, as well as trigger the muscle to relax.
"Our chip offers a simple, reliable and direct way to measure human responses to an asthma trigger," explained Alexander Peyton Nesmith, lead author of the report published in the journal Lab on a Chip.
"Asthma is one of the top reasons for trips to the emergency room -- particularly for children, and a large segment of the asthmatic population doesn't respond to currently available treatments," said Dr. Don Ingber, director of Harvard's Wyss Institute. "The airway muscle-on-a-chip provides an important and exciting new tool for discovering new therapeutic agents."
