Summary: | Mucus overproduction is an important feature of chronic inflammatory airway diseases including cystic fibrosis, chronic bronchitis, bronchiectasis and severe asthma. Inhaled drugs are often delivered to such diseased airways where mucus hypersecretion is likely to alter the deposition pattern of the drug particles, encouraging more central deposition where more mucus is present than in the airways of the periphery. The effect of the mucus on drug absorption is poorly understood, since there are few in vitro systems capable of modeling the effect of mucus on drug permeability. This project aims to characterize and develop selected lung cell lines as potential models of the airways to study drug permeability in the presence of mucus, whilst also using these models to study potential adverse effects of drug treatment in the airways. Currently there is no published work on drug permeability studies in the presence of mucus, using the chosen lung cell lines.
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