Anika Alim had never worked with living cells before she joined Assistant Professor Jungwook "Jay" Paek’s lab at Binghamton University, but within months she was helping simulate asthma attacks on human airway tissue—inside a device no bigger than a USB drive. Using lung-on-a-chip technology, Paek and his team have uncovered a hidden driver of asthma’s long-term damage: mechanical stress. While inflammation has long been the focus of asthma research, this study reveals that the physical act of wheezing and airway constriction during an attack can permanently reshape lung tissue, independent of immune response. This is critical for the 25 million Americans—about 8% of the population—living with asthma, as it shifts how scientists understand disease progression and opens new paths for treatment.
The lung-on-a-chip system, developed in collaboration with researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Toledo, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, mimics the mechanical forces airways endure during an asthma attack. Tiny chambers expand and contract to simulate breathing under stress, while human-derived airway cells grow in a 3D matrix that replicates natural tissue. What the team observed was striking: repeated mechanical strain triggered fibrosis—the overproduction of extracellular matrix proteins—and angiogenesis, the abnormal growth of blood vessels. Both changes thicken airway walls, narrowing the space for airflow and making future attacks more likely, creating a dangerous feedback loop.
Published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, this is the first study to isolate mechanical force as a direct cause of tissue remodeling in asthma. "This is the first time that anyone has demonstrated the effect of a mechanical process on tissue remodeling—including both fibrosis and angiogenesis—in asthma patients," Paek said. The device also allowed researchers to test how medications might interrupt this cycle, laying the groundwork for therapies that target structural changes, not just inflammation.
For Alim, the project was transformative. "When I first started, he showed me everything himself—it was a very collaborative experience," she recalled. "I had no idea how to work with cells, but he was there at every step." Now, their microengineered model is helping redefine asthma as not just an inflammatory disease, but a mechanical one too. As Paek expands his work into neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, this research stands as a testament to engineering’s power to reveal the body’s hidden mechanics. And for millions of asthma patients, it offers hope: if we can see the damage in real time, we can learn to stop it before it starts.