Experimental Full-volume Airway Approximation for Assessing Breath-dependent Regional Aerosol Deposition.

Modeling aerosol dynamics in the airways is challenging, and most modern personalized tools consider only a single inhalation maneuver through less than 10% of the total lung volume. Here, we present an modeling pipeline to produce a device that preserves patient-specific upper airways while approximating deeper airways, capable of achieving total lung volumes over 7 liters. The modular system, called TIDAL, includes tunable inhalation and exhalation breathing capabilities with resting flow rates up to 30 liters per minute.

Nebulization of Model Hydrogel Nanoparticles to Macrophages at the Air-Liquid Interface.

Nanoparticle evaluation within the pulmonary airspace has increasingly important implications for human health, with growing interest from drug delivery, environmental, and toxicology fields. While there have been widespread investigations of nanoparticle physiochemical properties following many routes of administration, nanoparticle behavior at the air-liquid interface (ALI) is less well-characterized. In this work, we fabricate two formulations of poly(ethylene)-glycol diacrylate (PEGDA)-based model nanoparticles to establish an workflow allowing evaluation of nanoparticle charge effects at the ALI.