About 80% of patients with heart failure develop pulmonary edema – the leakage of fluid out of the lungs’ blood vessels and into the air-filled alveoli. This condition reduces the amount of oxygen that the lungs can absorb, which can prevent patients from doing everyday activities and even be fatal. There are no drugs currently available to directly treat the leakage once it starts; the most commonly prescribed medications simply lower blood pressure or the amount of fluid in the entire body in an attempt to reduce the damage.
Now, a project a decade in the making at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) has identified a molecular pathway that could offer a way to target pulmonary edema itself with minimal side effects. The advance is based on engineering of adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors as gene therapy delivery systems that target the lung and studies using primary human lung cells in a Lung Alveolus Chip. The research is reported in APL Bioengineering.
