Expression data of mucociliated human airway epithelia on-chip with or without exposure to whole cigarette smoke under physiological breathing

Smoking represents a major risk factor for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), but it is difficult to characterize smoke-induced injury responses under physiological breathing conditions in humans. Here we generated small airway-on-a-chip microdevices lined by living human bronchiolar epithelium from normal or COPD patients and connected them to an instrument that 'breathes' whole cigarette smoke in and out of the chips to study smoke-induced pathophysiology in vitro. We used microarrays to detail the global program of gene expression in well-differentiated epithelial cells following smoke exposure to recapitulate clinical pathologies and identify disease-specific responses. Epithelial cells on-chip were challenged with whole cigarette smoke for 75 min (9 x research-grade 3R4F cigarettes), and 24 hours later were lysed and their RNA extracted for Affymetrix microarray analysis.