How can models made from human lung tissue replace previous animal experiments or purely cell biological models? Mircea-Gabriel Stoleriu is conducting research on this topic at the Munich site of the German Center for Lung Research (CPC-M).
He presented his project on this topic at the annual meeting of the German Society for Thoracic Surgery in September 2022 in Essen: "Thoracic surgery contribution to the establishment of novel human ex-vivo lung disease models".
In essence, the aim is to make an even better contribution to thoracic surgery and pneumology by means of highly innovative experimental models. To this end, Stoleriu brought together the surgeons as well as the biobank at the Asklepios Pulmonary Hospital München-Gauting and the LMU clinic, the bioArchive of the CPC-M and the working groups of the DZL-PIs Olivia Merkel (LMU clinic), Gerald Burgstaller and Herbert Schiller (both LHI, Helmholtz Munich).
In the first step, the Asklepios Biobank provided tissue samples from lung cancer patients. The researchers transformed them into ultra-thin human precision lung cut slices, cultured them and used them to develop three-dimensional lung tissue cultures. They subjected these human ex-vivo studies to pharmacological treatments and numerous analyses and experiments such as transcriptome and proteomic analysis and single cell RNA-seq experiments.
The ex vivo models explored in this project could be used, for example, in research projects on the inhibition of Sars-CoV2 in the lung or in the identification of new antifibrotic therapeutics.
This collaboration between clinical and experimental departments from research and medicine excited the DGT expert panel and they selected it for the 500 Euro poster award.