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Session Description: In this discussion, speakers will present guidance and advice on using precision cut lung slices for studying various lung diseases.
Panelists:
Dr. Yan Bai is a physician-scientist practicing pulmonary and critical care medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and conducting translational research at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research interest is understanding the functional role of the intrapulmonary airway and vascular smooth muscle in health and diseases such as asthma and pulmonary hypertension. Her recent work has extended to exploring the early-life root of airway disease. Her exceptional research expertise is to utilize and optimize the live lung tissue section, i.e., precision-cut lung slice (PCLS), to study lung physiology and pathobiology. Her work also focuses on the intracellular signaling pathways that modify smooth muscle function. In particular, with confocal and two-photon microscopy, she exploits the PCLS as a unique platform to investigate the calcium signaling-medicated regulation of intrapulmonary smooth muscle cells in disease conditions. Moreover, utilizing human PCLSs, her work is trying to bridge the gap between animal and clinical studies and translate the knowledge from animal research to clinical practice.
Dr. Bourke is an Associate professor of Pharmacology at Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute. She leads the Respiratory Pharmacology group in this devision where her research concentrates on therapies for Chronic Lung Diseases such as Asthma, COPD, and Infectious Diseases. She has unique expertise with Precision cut Lung Slice Techniques to visualize intrapulmonary airway and artery lumen area.
Dr. Bourke’s Lab Page: https://www.monash.edu/discovery-institute/bourke-lab/home
Liah Fereydoonzad studied mechanical and biomedical engineering at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. Working at SCIREQ for the last 14 years, Liah is R&D manager, overseeing and guiding product development across all of SCIREQ’s product platforms. She has been actively involved in PCLS and the development of the physioLens over the past 4 years.
We are proud to introduce the physioLens at ATS this year; a scientific platform that provides accurate physiological and image-based outcomes in a reproducible fashion. It includes an automated microscope and fluid handling system.
The physioLens is capable of capturing images anywhere on slices in a 6 well plate and apply doses without user intervention. Images are analyzed in real-time to provide bronchoconstriction data.
Agonists are provided to the slice without user intervention by a dosing nozzle, that can provide a 95% media exchange in less than 20 seconds. In addition, eight dosing bottles are provided to complete a detailed dose response automatically.
Image analysis: Images of airways are automatically processed to capture the lumen contours and then calculate bronchoconstriction.
Navigating a slice is not necessary with our airway configuration wizard complete with full slice mapping. Fine tune the positions of interest with our click-and-drag XY navigation.
Tissue slices are held in place with a transparent when wet membrane allowing seamless sample-mounting.
