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Human precision cut lung slices: an ex vivo platform for therapeutic target discovery and drug testing in lung disease

Edited by:
Assistant Professor Cynthia J. Koziol-White, PhD, Rutgers University, United States 
Professor Reynold A. Panettieri, Jr, MD, Rutgers University, United States

Submission Status: Open   |   Submission Deadline: 15 August 2025


Respiratory Research is calling for submissions to our Collection on Human precision cut lung slices: an ex vivo platform for therapeutic target discovery and drug testing in lung disease. Precision cut lung slices (PCLS) have been utilized in many facets of respiratory research since the late 1970’s, with studies encompassing a multitude of areas including: toxicology, metabolism (both drug metabolism and cellular metabolism), drug discovery, lung cancer biology, obstructive and fibrotic lung diseases, respiratory pathogen exposure, the mechanics of breathing, and vascular lung disease.  Whether derived from experimental animal models, or from human lungs, the use of PCLS enabled significant progress to be made in the understanding of responses from an integrated cell system, thereby providing a greater understanding of basic mechanisms underlying aspects of lung biology, but also how the pathogenesis of lung disease(s) occur(s).  PCLS provides a platform for therapeutic drug discovery and testing to reverse or prevent the pathogenesis of lung disease.  This collection of articles will include short reports, full length research articles, and reviews of current literature.

Image legend: From top left to right – Image 1: Non-stimulated airway from a single hPCLS. Image 2: The same airway contracted following IgE crosslinking (Credit: Cynthia Koziol-White).  Image 3: Merged image of an airway lumen and parenchyma of an hPCLS stained for ICAM-1 (red) and alpha smooth muscle actin (green) (Credit: Gaoyuan Cao).  From bottom left to right– Image 1: Airway lumen from an hPCLS infected with a GFP-labeled rhinovirus C15 strain (Credit: Eric Gebski).  Image 2: spatial RNAseq of a slice of lung from a 65 year old IPF patient showing distribution of fibroblasts, T cells, and alveolar type 1 and 2 cells (Credit: Qi Yang’s lab).

New Content ItemThis collection supports and amplifies research related to SDG 3: Good health and well-being. 

Meet the Guest Editors

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Cynthia Koziol-White, Assistant Professor, Rutgers University, USA

Cynthia received her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Her postdoctoral training was at University of Pennsylvania with Dr. Angela Haczku and Dr. Reynold A. Panettieri, Jr.  In 2016, she became an Instructor in the Department of Pharmacology in the Robert Wood Johnson School of Medicine and was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2019.  Cynthia’s research interests include understanding how respiratory virus exposure alters airway responsiveness to contractile agonists and bronchodilators.

Reynold A. Panettieri, Professor, Rutgers University, USA

Rey received his MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine, and a Fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Penn. He completed three postdoctoral fellowships that focused on the study of the molecular mechanisms regulating the immunobiology, growth, and excitation-contraction coupling of smooth muscle. In 1989, he was appointed as faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and rose through the ranks to become the Robert L. Mayock and David A. Cooper Professor of Medicine in the Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Division of the Department of Medicine, and served as Deputy Director of the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine where he remains Professor Emeritus. In 2015, Rey became a Professor of Medicine, Vice Chancellor for Translational Medicine and Science, and the Director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Science at Rutgers University.  Rey’s research interests focus on airway smooth muscle function in asthma, including growth and responses to current therapeutics.

  1. We recently reported that the ovarian cancer G protein-coupled receptor-1 (OGR1) can be pharmacologically biased with specific benzodiazepines to couple with distinct heterotrimeric G proteins in human airway ...

    Authors: Dominic R. Villalba, Arun K. Jannu, Elham Javed, Isha Dandekar, Ruping Wang, Deepak A. Deshpande, Steven S. An, Reynold A. Panettieri Jr., Dale D. Tang, Raymond B. Penn and Ajay P. Nayak
    Citation: Respiratory Research 2025 26:183
    Content type: Research Published on:

  2. Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) causes high mortality and has no specific pharmacological treatment. Scarcity of drugs against ARDS is in part due to the lack of models for ARDS. As raised serum hem...

    Authors: Namrata Kewalramani, Carlos Machahua, Thomas Michael Marti, Cas Zandbergen, Savvina Chortarea, Jessica Beretta-Piccoli, Christophe von Garnier, Patrick Dorn, Kleanthis Fytianos and Manuela Funke-Chambour
    Citation: Respiratory Research 2025 26:124
    Content type: Research Published on:

  3. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak revealed the susceptibility of elderly patients to respiratory virus infections, showing cell senescence or subclinical persistent inflammatory profiles and fav...

    Authors: Melanie Brügger, Carlos Machahua, Trix Zumkehr, Christiana Cismaru, Damian Jandrasits, Bettina Trüeb, Sara Ezzat, Blandina I. Oliveira Esteves, Patrick Dorn, Thomas M. Marti, Gert Zimmer, Volker Thiel, Manuela Funke-Chambour and Marco P. Alves
    Citation: Respiratory Research 2025 26:112
    Content type: Research Published on:

  4. Human precision-cut lung slices (hPCLS) are a unique platform for functional, mechanistic, and drug discovery studies in the field of respiratory research. However, tissue availability, generation, and cultiva...

    Authors: M. Camila Melo-Narvaez, Fee Gölitz, Eshita Jain, Janine Gote-Schniering, Mircea Gabriel Stoleriu, Wilhelm Bertrams, Bernd Schmeck, Ali Önder Yildirim, Ursula Rauen, Timo Wille and Mareike Lehmann
    Citation: Respiratory Research 2025 26:57
    Content type: Research Published on:

  5. Fibrotic cocktail (FC) is a combination of pro-fibrotic and pro-inflammatory mediators that induces early fibrotic changes in organotypic lung models. We hypothesised that transforming growth factor beta 1 (TG...

    Authors: Carlos Machahua, Thomas M. Marti, Patrick Dorn and Manuela Funke-Chambour
    Citation: Respiratory Research 2025 26:44
    Content type: Correspondence Published on:

  6. Progressive forms of interstitial lung diseases, including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), are deadly disorders lacking non-invasive biomarkers for assessment of early disease activity, which presents a m...

    Authors: Thomas J. Harr, Nikesh Gupta, Babita Rahar, Kristen Stott, Yadira Medina-Guevara, Metti K. Gari, Angie T. Oler, Ivy Sohee McDermott, Hye Jin Lee, Morteza Rasoulianboroujeni, Ashley M. Weichmann, Amir Forati, Kelsey Holbert, Trevor S. Langel, Kade W. Coulter, Brian M. Burkel…
    Citation: Respiratory Research 2025 26:34
    Content type: Research Published on:

  7. Precision-cut lung slices (PCLS) are ex vivo models with preserved lung cell populations and maintained tissue architecture. PCLS are, therefore, a powerful tool in respiratory research to study molecular mech...

    Authors: Wojciech Langwiński, Joanna Nowakowska, Kosma Sakrajda, Kamil Ziarniak, Zuzanna Stachowiak, Maria Kachel, Beata Narożna and Aleksandra Szczepankiewicz
    Citation: Respiratory Research 2024 25:422
    Content type: Research Published on:

  8. The first 24 h of infection represent a critical time window in interactions between pathogens and host tissue. However, it is not possible to study such early events in human lung during natural infection due...

    Authors: Aaqib Sohail, Fakhar H. Waqas, Peter Braubach, Laurien Czichon, Mohamed Samir, Azeem Iqbal, Leonardo de Araujo, Stephan Pleschka, Michael Steinert, Robert Geffers and Frank Pessler
    Citation: Respiratory Research 2024 25:369
    Content type: Research Published on:

  9. Precision Cut Lung Slices (PCLS) have emerged as a sophisticated and physiologically relevant ex vivo model for studying the intricacies of lung diseases, including fibrosis, injury, repair, and host defense m...

    Authors: Cynthia Koziol-White, Eric Gebski, Gaoyaun Cao and Reynold A. Panettieri Jr.
    Citation: Respiratory Research 2024 25:231
    Content type: Review Published on:

    The Correction to this article has been published in Respiratory Research 2025 26:42

  10. Publications utilizing precision cut lung slices (PCLS) steadily increased from the 1970’s, with a significant increase in 2010, to tripling by 2023. PCLS have been used to study a vast array of pulmonary dise...

    Authors: Cynthia J. Koziol-White and Reynold A. Panettieri Jr.
    Citation: Respiratory Research 2024 25:137
    Content type: Matters Arising Published on:

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of short reports, full length research articles, and reviews of current literature. Should you wish to submit a different article type, please read our submission guidelines to confirm that type is accepted by the journal. 

Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp. Please, select the appropriate Collection title “Human precision cut lung slices: an ex vivo platform for therapeutic target discovery and drug testing in lung disease" under the “Details” tab during the submission stage.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer-review process. The peer-review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.