LAUSR

The past years havewitnessed concerted efforts across the respiratory community to establishmore relevant in vitro preclinical tools for pulmonary research [1–3]. A strong incentive for such endeavors stems from the need to deliver novel therapies for respiratory diseases, a point sharply underlined at the 2014 European Respiratory Society Presidential Summit [4]. Very few new classes of safe and effective drugs have been introduced over the past half century. In contrast to other disease areas (e.g. cardiovascular, neurological), pulmonary medicine has witnessed substantially fewer drugs approved, a situation coinciding with comparatively less drug candidates and a higher failure rate. Such facts are concurrent with the observation that pulmonary diseases represent a vast and growing health-care financial burden worldwide, associated with high morbidity and mortality [5]. Yet, there has been little impact in therapies treating, for example, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the fourth leading cause of death globally [4]. In parallel, asthma continues to be among the most prevalent worldwide diseases, underscoring the need for effective treatments in pediatric [6] and severe asthmatic populations [7]. Meanwhile, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis (TB) represent an increasing risk due to lack of effective therapies resulting from low efficacy and high toxicity in the face of multidrug-resistant TB [8,9]. The same is true for pulmonary infections by biofilm-forming bacteria (as a consequence of cystic fibrosis) when the increasing occurrence of antimicrobial resistance will require novel anti-infective therapies, complementary to established antibiotics [10]. With a dire need to advance available pulmonary therapies, this short editorial underlines bioengineering opportunities for leveraging microfluidic-based lung-on-chips in devising novel human-relevant in vitro models of respiratory disorders and ultimately help accelerate pulmonary preclinical research.