3D model to study epithelium-stroma interplay in pulmonary diseases
2011
Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, USA
Alterations in the interplay between epithelial and stromal tissue have been shown to be critical in several human pathologies, also in pulmonary diseases such as asthma, fibrosis or cancer. Here, a 3D in vitro model of the human airway was built using a type-I collagen matrix populated with healthy or cancer-associated human lung fibroblasts and normal human bronchial epithelial cells to study epithelial-mesenchymal interactions. The results showed that the generated culture had a well-differentiated pseudo-stratified multilayer structure recapitulating the in vivo organization. Co-culture with normal fibroblasts induced the formation of typical respiratory surface epithelium, while cancer-associated fibroblasts caused epithelial cells to acquire an invasive phenotype. Moreover, the data suggest that this erroneous behaviour might be led by biomechanical signals associated with the extracellular matrix. Furthermore, paracrine signalling from cancer-associated fibroblasts induced epithelial cells to express genes associated with several pathological processes. Overall, the researchers demonstrate that this newly developed model can be used to study the pathological interactions between epithelium and cancer-associated fibroblasts that lead to dysfunction of normal epithelial cells.
The effect of stromal components on the modulation of the phenotype of human bronchial epithelial cells in 3D culture
Carlos Sonnenschein
Added on: 11-25-2021
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014296121100682X[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/176d71e6-5082-4b29-8472-b719f6bda323
