Description
Smoking represents a major risk factor for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), but it is difficult to characterize smoke-induced injury responses under physiological breathing conditions in humans. Here we generated small airway-on-a-chip microdevices lined by living human bronchiolar epithelium from normal or COPD patients and connected them to an instrument that 'breathes' whole cigarette smoke in and out of the chips to study smoke-induced pathophysiology in vitro. We used microarrays to detail the global program of gene expression in well-differentiated epithelial cells following smoke exposure to recapitulate clinical pathologies and identify disease-specific responses.