21EBTA. Bioengineering iLUNGs - Building scalable, integrated, multicellular and personalised human in vitro LUNGs

The human respiratory system exists to perform gas exchange and thus support life. The entire cellular surface of the lung is continuous with air from the main airways, to tree-like branched airways and the sacs where gas exchange happens - these are called alveoli.

Although there has been great progress in laboratory models of individual parts of the lung, they do not have this feature of functional evolution from the airways to the the alveoli. The absence of integrated models has hampered progress in understanding lung physiology and what happens in lung disease. Further, key societal issues like the development of new inhaled treatments for specific diseases and an understanding of what environmental pollution does to the lung would be really enhanced by better models.

In this project, we aim to engineer a living model of the human lung where the airway to the alveolar sacs are fully connected and functional. We call it the iLUNG. A key advantage of our work is that we will use multiple cell types from an individual patient to create them.

This means that they will be truly individualised "mini-lungs" and will therefore hopefully reflect the disease associated with the person that we grew the cells from. This opens up the possibility of more targeted treatments for lung disease as well new possibilities to understand basic lung biology and how different types of cells in the lung talk to each other.

We have put together a great team of lung bioengineers for this proposal and have the engineering and scientific infrastructure as well as access to patients to make this project deliverable. We are tremendously excited by the potential of the iLUNG and are fully motivated to train the next generation of lung bioengineers. Finally we are clear that we want this technology to be used widely in academia and industry and eventually be both a scientific and commercial success.