Before new drugs can be administered to humans, the researchers first have to investigate their effects using cell cultures and animal experiments.
For this purpose, human cell cultures are increasingly used as a model system.
At the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, a research team led by director Thomas F.
Meyer developed a model of the human lung epithelium to test compounds to combat the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. In the mid-1990s, Meyer began to develop organ-like structures in his laboratory, the then Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen breed, which he called spheroids.
Together with surgical colleagues from the University Hospital in Tübingen, Meyer produced organoids from gastrointestinal epithelial tissue.
At that time, cultures were still very short-lived; Since then, Meyer and his colleagues have improved their cell cultivation methods to such an extent that the organoids can be kept alive almost indefinitely.
Researchers are currently working with epithelial organoids from the fallopian tube, cervix, prostate, gallbladder and lungs, and epithelial cells from the lungs pose a particular challenge because they have the potential to differentiate into different cell types, including type I pneumocytes and type II.
The primary cell cultures develop from the distal human airway epithelial cells of the lower respiratory tract, from which the cells that form the surface of the air sac of the lungs – the alveolar epithelial cells – develop, and type II pneumocytes produce crucial proteins that reduce the surface tension of the alveoli and prevent them from collapsing.
Type I pneumocytes, on the other hand, are thin, flat cells that allow gas exchange between the alveolus and the surrounding blood capillaries.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is able to attach to and infect the alveolar pneumocytes.
Thomas Meyer’s quasi-immortal lung epithelial cells are therefore a good model system for the researchers to…
–
