User:
Fizan Abdullah, Johns Hopkins Children's Center, Baltimore, Md.
Project:
Studying the alveolar capillary membrane at the air/liquid interface of the lung.
Problem:
In the lung, cells that line up on opposing sides of a basement membrane are subject to micromechanical forces such as respiration and 3-D constraints. Existing pulmonary cell-culture techniques don't model such fluid flow stress.
Solution:
Inspired by microfluidic liver culture, Abdullah put a handful of bioengineering students to work on a solution. They began by putting a half-dollar-sized PDMS plastic device with four 10 mm-diameter microchannels atop a glass slide, and connecting it to a syringe pump via steel syringe needles. The system allowed Abdullah to characterize the growth of alveolar cells under different rates of perfusion.
In vivo, alveolar cells grow on one side of a collagen membrane, with endothelial cells on the other. There's no technology yet to create a 0.1 to 1 μm-thick ...
