Grant: Cat Gr: Develop./validation of new biomedical techniques/technolo.- General Pool

Fifteen years ago, people thought the deep parts of the lungs were completely germ-free. We now understand that the lungs have their own community of microbes that work closely with the lung's immune system. This teamwork plays a crucial role in keeping our lungs healthy and in controlling diseases. In other body parts like the gut and skin, we know that certain immune cells (called macrophages and neutrophils) are influenced by the microbes present there. Although this could be similar in the lungs, most of what we know comes from studying other organs or animals like mice. However, these animal studies don't always do a good job of showing what really happens in humans because they don't mimic the human body's microbial environment or immune responses well. This gap in our understanding points to a big area in health research that needs more focus, especially studies that use human lung models to explore how the lung's microbes and immune system interact and affect lung function. Our research project plans to address these gaps. We want to improve our knowledge of how microbes in the lungs affect our immune system to gain insight into human lung health and disease. To do this, we are using advanced technology called organ-on-a-chip. Our goals are to develop a three-dimensional lung model that includes human immune cells, connect this lung model to a bone marrow model to integrate a more diverse immune system, and finally introduce a stable community of lung microbes into this setup. By building this platform, we aim to better understand how the lung's microbes and immune system contribute to lung diseases that affect over 10 million Canadians and cost our healthcare system billions of dollars each year.