Transforming how we investigate viruses and therapies with human tissue airway models
COVID-19 revealed that lab-tested medicines might not work as well in humans – so researchers got to work.
When COVID-19 began sweeping the world in 2020, testing for potential antiviral treatments swiftly gathered pace.
But, as School of Biomedical Science research fellow Dr Jessica Neil (Department of Microbiology and Immunology) explains, a critical issue emerged: medicines that appeared effective in the laboratory often didn’t show the same responses in humans.
So Dr Neil’s team at the Peter Doherty Institute began developing respiratory tract models that better represent the human airway.
The researchers are transforming how viruses and therapies are investigated by developing human tissue airway models at scale. This could fast-track successful clinical trials.
“We’re developing sophisticated human airway models that far more closely mimic what happens in humans during a viral infection,” Dr Neil said recently. “And critically, we aim to be able to produce these models fast and at scale, to test therapies during a pandemic.”
The project is developing human-like models using three approaches:
- cultures from cells taken from a person’s nose or airways
- stem cell-derived lung lining cells
- precision-cut lung slices from organ donor tissue.
The hope is that these methods will reliably achieve more “life-like” responses.
“With precision-cut lung slices, we’re literally putting virus on a section of lung, maintaining the natural architecture and different cell types,” Dr Neil explained. “The challenge is that these tissues are only available via organ donors and have not yet been developed at scale.”
“We want to create a suite of validated, ready-to-deploy airway models so that if a pandemic strikes, researchers can generate clinically accurate data from day one. We’re in the early stages of developing these new-era models and there’s significant opportunity to improve them,” said Dr Neil.