Human airway musculature on a chip: an in vitro model of allergic asthmatic bronchoconstriction and bronchodilation.

Many potential new asthma therapies that show promise in the pre-clinical stage of drug development do not demonstrate efficacy during clinical trials. One factor contributing to this problem is the lack of human-relevant models of the airway that recapitulate the tissue-level structural and functional phenotypes of asthma. Hence, we sought to build a model of a human airway musculature on a chip that simulates healthy and asthmatic bronchoconstriction and bronchodilation in vitro by engineering anisotropic, laminar bronchial smooth muscle tissue on elastomeric thin films.

Micropatterning Alginate Substrates for Cardiovascular Muscle on a Chip.

Soft hydrogels such as alginate are ideal substrates for building muscle because they have structural and mechanical properties close to the extracellular matrix (ECM) network. However, hydrogels are generally not amenable to protein adhesion and patterning. Moreover, muscle structures and their underlying ECM are highly anisotropic, and it is imperative that models recapitulate the structural anisotropy in reconstructed tissues for relevance due to the tight coupling between sturcture and function in these systems.