Bioinspired in vitro lung airway model for inflammatory analysis via hydrophobic nanochannel membrane with joint three-phase interface

Because of the extremely low solubility of gas pollution, elucidating the pathogenetic mechanism between air pollution and the lung inflammatory response has remained a significant challenge. Here, we develop a bioinspired nanoporous membrane (BNM) with a three-phase interface as a gas exposure model that mimicks the airway mechanism, gas molecules contacting with alveolar cells directly, enabling high cell viability and sensitive inflammatory response analysis. Specifically, the top side of the porous anodic alumina (PAA) membrane was in contact with the medium for cell culture, and the bottom side contacted the gas phase directly for gas exposure. Compared with the two-phase interface, the viability of cells on the BNM was enhanced up to 3-fold. Additionally, results demonstrated that the inflammatory responses of cells stimulated by gas pollution (formaldehyde and benzene as models) from the gas phase were more obvious than those induced by gas pollution from solution, especially the increment of interleukin-2 (IL-2), IL-6, and tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α), which was almost 2 times greater than that induced by gas pollution from solution. Furthermore, an enzyme inhibitor was introduced to evaluate potential applications of the BNM.