Decellularized organs are continually being used in a variety of tissue engineering applications. However, most of these studies consider the organ as a whole and not the individual anatomical regions. We developed this method to look at individual anatomical regions of decellularized human lungs for more precise model systems for downstream applications.
When developing model systems, it's important to consider different design aspects so that your system best recapitulates normal biology. For the lung, this includes factors such as environmental stress, cyclic mechanical stress, and elasticity, which may differ between independent regions of the lung. Utilizing this method, we've been able to show that the extracellular matrix derived from individual anatomical lung regions from both healthy and diseased lungs have distinct proteomic signatures.
This allows us to further understand lung disease and potentially come up with novel therapeutic avenues. To continue with this research, our lab is currently developing three-dimensional hydrogels from healthy and diseased lung extracellular matrix. These hydrogels allow us to perform in vitro organoid modeling in order to elucidate the role of extracellular matrix interactions on corresponding cell behavior.
