Realistic mini-lungs, grown in lab dishes using adult stem cells, feature all cell types that make up the human organ, allowing for “Phase 0” testing of new treatments for respiratory diseases, including COVID-19.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States in early 2020, scientists have struggled to find laboratory models of SARS-CoV-2 infection, the respiratory virus that causes COVID-19. Animal models fell short; attempts to grow adult human lungs have historically failed because not all of the cell types survived.
Undaunted, stem cell scientists, cell biologists, infectious disease experts and cardiothoracic surgeons at University of California San Diego School of Medicine teamed up to see if they could overcome multiple hurdles.
Writing in a paper publishing August 31, 2021 in eLife, the team describes the first adult human “lung-in-a-dish” models, also known as lung organoids that represent all cell types. They also report that SARS-CoV-2 infection of the lung organoids replicates real-world patient lung infections, and reveals the specialized roles various cell types play in infected lungs.
“This human disease model will now allow us to test drug efficacy and toxicity, and reject ineffective compounds early in the process, at ‘Phase 0,’ before human clinical trials begin,” said Pradipta Ghosh, MD, professor, director of the Institute for Network Medicine and executive director of the HUMANOID Center of Research Excellence (CoRE) at UC San Diego School of Medicine. Ghosh co-led the study with Soumita Das, PhD, associate professor of pathology at UC San Diego School of Medicine and founding co-director and chief scientific officer of HUMANOID CoRE.
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eLife. Research Paper:
