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© Corinne Jud et al., 2015; Published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. This Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.
*, Address correspondence to: Barbara Rothen-Rutishauser, PhD, Adolphe Merkle Institute, University of Fribourg, , Ch. de Verdiers 4, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland, E-mail: [email protected]
Introduction
In the field of regulatory toxicology, animal testing is the standard approach to test possible adverse effects of chemicals or drugs.1 New concepts for more efficient, cheaper, and evidence-based test strategies have been proposed, such as a shift from phenomenological analyses in animals toward mechanism-based assays using human primary cells and cell lines.2 The lung is the main portal of entry for inhaled aerosols3 and is therefore a promising pathway for the inhalation of drugs.4 Attention has recently been directed toward elucidating how aerosol-based pharmaceuticals interact with the lung barrier, many cell models having been established to address this question.5
In vitro cocultures mimicking the alveolar-capillary barrier with two cell types, that is, epithelial and endothelial cells (either primary cells or cell lines), have been described previously.6-8 Another development focused on the design of a "lung-on-a-chip" setup to reconstitute the alveolar-capillary interface of the human lung with cocultures under flow and breathing conditions, that is, mechanical stress.9,10 In addition to the barrier structure, other models have started to include immune cells to mimic the innate and adapted immune response to the inhalation of...