Smoking biochip

A new robot smoker will allow scientists to more thoroughly investigate human lung diseases

DailyTechInfo based on IEEE materials: A Cigarette-Smoking Robot for Better Lung Disease Research

A group of scientists from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University has developed and created a specialized robot smoker designed for in-depth studies of lung diseases that are the consequences of smoking. This robot can "smoke" 10 cigarettes in a row, and the resulting smoke is directed to a tiny chip on the surface of which there are living cells grown from samples taken in human lungs. This "light-on-a-chip" gives scientists the opportunity to study the reaction of living cells to exposure to smoke, and open access and the highest level of detail allows scientists to explore what experiments on experimental animals do not allow.

The main disease that will be studied with the help of a robot smoker is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the consequences of which are emphysema and chronic bronchitis. People suffering from such diseases breathe with great difficulty due to clogging of the pathways through which air enters the lungs. Unfortunately, effective treatment methods have not yet been developed for these diseases and there are now about 65 million people worldwide with a similar diagnosis.

Studying the effects of tobacco smoke on living cells is quite a difficult task. Cultivating living cells in a Petri dish and fumigating them with smoke does not give even approximate results, because this approach is very far from the dynamics of the movement of smoke in human lungs. Testing all this on experimental animals also does not give proper results, since experimental rodents, unlike humans, always breathe through the nose.

The robot smoker ignites a cigarette using a special device and, using the so-called "micro-respirator" (micro-respirator), "inhales" smoke, mimicking the rhythmic movement of human lungs as much as possible. Researchers have the ability to regulate the robot's "behavior" by increasing or decreasing the rate of smoking, the depth of "inhalation" of tobacco smoke, etc. The resulting tobacco smoke is fed into a microchannel system, the surface of which is covered with epithelial cells, cells that cover the surface of human lungs. For the experiments, the scientists took cell samples from a healthy person and from people suffering from various chronic lung diseases, and these experiments themselves became the first steps that in the future will lead to the development and testing of drugs capable of resisting chronic lung diseases.

In addition to regular cigarettes, a robot smoker can also "smoke" electronic cigarettes, which, as some scientists suspect, are not as safe as their advertising claims.

And in conclusion, it should be noted that the development of a smoking robot is a continuation of the work of researchers from the Weiss Institute, who have already been able to develop a number of organs-on-a-chip, which contain built-in sensors that greatly facilitate the research process. All these components are parts of a larger program, the ultimate goal of which is to create a "man-on-a-chip", an entire laboratory of 10 organ chips that are analogs of all the main organs of the human body.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  01.11.2016