If someone told you they were working on lungs in a dish you might be forgiven for thinking that’s the worst idea for a new recipe you have ever heard of. But in the case of Dr. Evan Snyder and his team at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute it could be a recipe for a powerful new tool against COVID-19. 

Earlier this month the CIRM Board approved almost $250,000 for Dr. Snyder and his team to use human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), a type of stem cell that can be created by reprogramming skin or blood cells, to create any other cell in the body, including lung cells.

These cells will then be engineered to become 3D lung organoids or “mini lungs in a dish”. The importance of this is that these cells resemble human lungs in a way animal models do not. They have the same kinds of cells, structures and even blood vessels that lungs do.

These cells will then be infected with the coronavirus and then be used to test two drugs to see if those drugs are effective against the virus.

In a news release Dr. Snyder says these cells have some big advantages over animal models, the normal method for early stage testing of new therapies.

“Mini lungs will also help us answer why some people with COVID-19 fare worse than others. Because they are made from hiPSCs, which come from patients and retain most of the characteristics of those patients, we can make ‘patient-specific’ mini lungs. We can compare the drug responses of mini lungs created from Caucasian, African American, and Latino men and women, as well as patients with a reduced capacity to fight infection to make sure that therapies work effectively in all patients. If not, we can adjust the dose or drug regime to help make the treatment more effective.

“We can also use the mini lungs experimentally to evaluate the effects of environmental toxins that come from cigarette smoking or vaping to make sure the drugs are still effective; and emulate the microenvironmental conditions in the lungs of patients with co-morbidities such as diabetes, and heart or kidney disease.”

To date CIRM has funded 15 projects targeting COVID-19, including three that are in clinical trials.