A high-throughput cigarette smoke-treated bronchosphere model for disease-relevant phenotypic compound screening

Cigarette smoking (CS) is the leading cause of COPD, and identifying the pathways that are driving pathogenesis in the airway due to CS exposure can aid in the discovery of novel therapies for COPD. An additional barrier to the identification of key pathways that are involved in the CS-induced pathogenesis is the difficulty in building relevant and high throughput models that can recapitulate the phenotypic and transcriptomic changes associated with CS exposure. To identify these drivers, we have developed a cigarette smoke extract (CSE)-treated bronchosphere assay in 384-well plate format that exhibits CSE-induced decreases in size and increase in luminal secretion of MUC5AC. Transcriptomic changes in CSE-treated bronchospheres resemble changes that occur in human smokers both with and without COPD compared to healthy groups, indicating that this model can capture human smoking signature. To identify new targets, we ran a small molecule compound deck screening with diversity in target mechanisms of action and identified hit compounds that attenuated CSE induced changes, either decreasing spheroid size or increasing secreted mucus. This work provides insight into the utility of this bronchopshere model to examine human respiratory disease impacted by CSE exposure and the ability to screen for therapeutics to reverse the pathogenic changes caused by CSE.