An immune-competent lung-on-a-chip for modelling the human severe influenza infection response

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-025-01491-9

Severe influenza affects 3ā€“5 million people worldwide each year, resulting in more than 300,000 deaths annually. However, standard-of-care antiviral therapeutics have limited effectiveness in these patients. Current preclinical models of severe influenza fail to accurately recapitulate the human immune response to severe viral infection. Here we develop an immune-competent, microvascularized, human lung-on-a-chip device to model the small airways, successfully demonstrating the cytokine storm, immune cell activation, epithelial cell damage, and other cellular- and tissue-level human immune responses to severe H1N1 infection.

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MBH/PS

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This is fascinating. Traditional models often fail to mimic the human immune response accurately, but this device seems to replicate main features like cytokine storms, immune activation and tissue damage. It can definitely improve drug testing in the future.