New Light on the Understanding of Cilia Beating in Human Airways
The airway surface of human lung is covered by mucus, which constitutes a natural protection for the organism against foreign particles and pathogens. The transport and evacuation of mucus is performed by the coordinated beating of billions of cilia.
Within the MACBRION project, we have recently unravel the mechanisms governing the long-range organization of ciliary beats, which allows for a directional and efficient mucus transport through human lungs.
Thanks to a combined numerical and experimental study, we have established the links between the dynamics of ciliary-beat orientation and the hydrodynamics of mucus. Hydrodynamical regimes observed experimentally on mucus flows are successfully reproduced by the numerical model.
The experimental study is performed on a human bronchial epithelium reconstituted in-vitro. The numerical modeling relies on the resolution of fluid momentum equations coupled to a streamwise-alignment rule governing the local orientation of the ciliary forcing.
A paper has just been submitted. More information coming to soon!
These recent findings are improving our actual understanding on the mucociliary clearance process, which is a key-mechanism to understand respiratory diseases such as severe asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases.
Pour le projet MACBRION
Appel à projets Interdisciplinarité 2016
Porteur de projet : Julien FAVIER