Researchers from Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Computer Science Take on The Ever-Branching Mysteries of The Human Lung
This is a very interesting article on how people who are involved in different fields of science come together for a common goal. Have you ever heard of a group of researchers and scientists from medicine, chemistry and computer science work together to study on Mucus? Well ,this article starts with one of the researchers, Richard Boucher, sharing his own definition of mucus. According to him, mucus is like flypaper, since it catches all these little particles in the air that we breathe. To do your own observation of mucus, you can look at a sample under a compound binocular microscope. To us, mucus is just a sticky and yucky substance but it in UNC Chapel Hill, but this has caught the interest of mathematicians, computer scientists, and polymer chemists. Knowing their background and specialization, you might wonder why these certain researchers have taken sudden interest on mucus; the whole article explains why.
It all started when Boucher and his colleague Bill Davis wanted to learn more about mucus and its stickiness. Have a closer look at mucus by using different types of microscopes like a compound binocular microscope. In a previous publication they had, they explained how the normal lung structure consisted of two fluid layers: mucus and a watery lubricating layer which had implications on cystic fibrosis. You yourself can have a closer look at how a lung tissue by using a compound binocular microscope. Their major question regarding this was why these two layers, even though they were both fluids never mixed. To help them solve their dilemma, they asked for the help of a professor on physics and astronomy, and also had expertise on very fine imaging, Richard Superfine. They were also very interested in a certain type of microscope he had in his possession which was an atomic fine microscope(AFM). Using this certain microscope, they were able to see at a molecular level the surface of the lung and the mucus- or mucins. View how mucins look like under a compound binocular microscope. They were able to observe that these mucins had attachments that looked like bottle brushes and were very hydrophobic or didn’t easily stick with water. Since they gained some insight on the interaction of mucus on the lung surface they realized they needed to understand the forces of these interactions. From this they realized to copy or imitate these interactions by making a model of it. This needed an applied mathematician.
From here they contacted Greg Forest who was an expert on complex fluids and at the same time associate chair for applied mathematics. Of course it was a surprise for Forest to have him working on mucus but he and his team started on their project on studying, modeling, and simulating the transport of biological fluids. From this growing group of researchers and experts bent on studying mucus, it came to Superfine that they could be doing something bigger with this project- and that was to make a fully interactive, predictive simulation on the human lung.
This was a very ambitious goal on his part but a potentially very efficient one in terms of medicine. This will easily speed up discovery and development of new drugs for lung problems since the effects of these drugs can easily be seen and tested on the team’s virtual lung before distribution to humans.
Before fulfillment of their virtual lung, they still had a lot of problems to tackle. They had to first understand how the lung works. View a lung tissue at a closer range using a compound binocular microscope. According to Forest, you had to understand first the physics of how it works. They had to understand how all these components all worked together. They needed to have a replica of the biochemistry of the lung also, on how it regulates itself, which meant that they also needed to have a sort of device to measure its temperature.
Now all the researchers’ problem was how to translate all of these information, procedures, and functions of the lung onto a computer simulation. Most likely each function would have one or more programs so the whole lung simulation would consist of a complex system of different computer programs. This now became a big challenge for them in computer science.
As of now, the team is still waiting for independent funding for their funding from the National Institutes of Health’s Roadmap initiative. They have a big advantage in their research already since they already have an experimental lung tissue model in which they test their computer models. Mentioned also in the article is the team’s ultimate visualization of their goal in which patient’s profiles regarding their lung’s health or complications can simply be entered in a computer and then after a while receive information on a new or recommended drugs.
