The laboratory of Dr. Roger C. Levesque addresses the issue of opportunistic infections caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, especially in patients with cystic fibrosis. Using a multidisciplinary approach we try to find alternative treatments to counter the problematic related to these infections.
The development of new antimicrobial inhibitors involves the use of in vitro bioassays in combination with animal models of infection. For obvious ethical reasons we decided to focus our efforts on developing an ex vivo lung tissue model using human cell lines and using 3D 3D bio-printing technology and in collaboration with the company. CELLINK.
This model can be used to study the pathogenesis of any respiratory pathogen, as well as to test the efficacy and / or cytotoxicity of therapeutic molecules. These respiratory models could also be used for genomic, transcriptomic and pulmonary proteomics studies that will allow the acquisition of metadata on pulmonary infections and host-microorganism interactions during therapy.