My name is Sandra Lawrynowicz Leibel. I'm an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of California San Diego. And I currently work as a scientist at the Sanford Burnham in La Jolla, as well as a Neonatologist at Rady Children's Hospital. As a neonatologist, I take care of a lot of babies that are born too early and they have to stay in a neonatal intensive care unit because their lungs are unable to remain open and they're unable to breathe on their own. This is due to a problem in their surfactant system and surfactant is actually the soapy molecule that coats our airways and allows our lungs to remain open when we breathe out. And being premature, this molecule actually isn't made in the quantity that's sufficient for a baby to breathe on their own. And so my interest in research is to study surfactant metabolism and hopefully discover ways to help these babies breathe better. The challenges in achieving physiological relevance are to truly replicate what is happening in the developing lung in a fetus, but in the form of a dish. And we are trying to replicate fetal lung development and ensuring that we are following the correct signals, that we are achieving the right cell types, and that they are not differentiating into inappropriate cell types. And one way of ensuring physiological relevance and to overcome this challenge is to maintain them in a three-dimensional organoid-like system. The Incucyte system has had many benefits in my work. From my work in understanding lung development, I use it to be able to take multiple pictures of the developing lungs from induced pluripotent stem cells. This is important because previously, I would have to take it out once a day, take a look at the organoids, and actually be able to see how they're developing. While now, I'm able to capture images every three to six hours and actually watch them get closer and in real-time to understand after I add this growth factor, what happens to the organoids? If I extend this amount of time, what happens to the way that the lung organoids are developing? Also, in my COVID-19 work, the Incucyte has been incredible to use. I've been able to utilize it not only to perform staining and look at the various cells that are infected but also have been actually able to make movies of lung organoids that have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and watch the timing of when those cells actually get destroyed by the virus. And that not only tells me that...that gives me a good sense of time for the actual viral replication process but also the type of cell death that that virus induces in the lung organoids themselves. For the future of my work, I'm hoping to be able to replicate lung tissue more accurately and not only study just the lung organoids that we're currently working with. So the lung organoids contain epithelial and mesenchymal cells, which are two important cell types in the lung. But two cells that are missing and are as important are the endothelial or the blood vessels as well as macrophages or the immune cells. So for our future work, we're actually differentiating macrophages and endothelial cells from pluripotent stem cells, and then we're going to tag them with different colors of cell tracker, and then we'll culture them with the lung organoids, and using the Incucyte system, actually watch them gather together, see how they kind of become a lung tissue organoid, and then, finally, infect them with SARS-CoV-2 and see the reaction that the macrophages and the endothelial cells, how they change in response to the infection.
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