Modeling COVID-19 Infection Kinetics in a High Throughput Human Primary Epithelial Airway Organ-on-Chip
Jeffrey Borenstein,
Co Program Leader,
DRAPER
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred unprecedented advances in vaccine development, but the identification and administration of efficacious therapeutics to treat critically ill patients has been less successful. A major limiting factor has been a lack of suitable preclinical tools for investigating mechanisms of COVID-19 infections, which are currently reliant upon various animal models and in vitro culture of immortalized cell lines. We report the first successful demonstration of robust and reproducible SARS-CoV-2 infection and viral replication in a human primary cell-based organ-on-chip, leveraging a recently developed tissue culture platform known as PREDICT96-ALI (Air-Liquid Interface.) These studies utilize human primary tracheobronchial epithelial cells derived from bronchoscopies performed on living donors, a capability that can ultimately lead to application of the technology to study patient-specific mechanisms of infection and therapeutic response, and the role of co-morbidities in these processes. This technology represents a powerful new pathway for modeling respiratory viral infections with high consequence pathogens, and an avenue for screening therapeutic candidates in a high throughput platform.
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