Pulmonary Artery Tone
The pulmonary arteries play a vital role in respiratory health, carrying deoxygenated blood from the heart to the lungs for oxygenation. Dysfunction in pulmonary vascular tone can contribute to diseases such as pulmonary hypertension and heart failure. Understanding how therapeutic compounds affect these vessels is critical during drug development—both for efficacy and safety profiling.
Ex Vivo Assessment of Vascular Tone
REPROCELL’s pulmonary artery tone assay uses an organ bath model to evaluate changes in vascular tone of freshly isolated human pulmonary arteries in response to your test articles. This ex vivo system is versatile and physiologically relevant, supporting a wide range of pharmacological and toxicological endpoints.
We can measure both vasoconstrictions, the increased arterial tone, and vasodilations, the relaxation of pre-constricted vessels. The assay is ideal for assessing the vascular activity of novel drug candidates and reference compounds across diverse mechanisms of action.
Image: Isolated pulmonary sections in a Petri dish.
Key Features:
- Multiple endpoints: Including EC₅₀, IC₅₀, pA₂, and maximum response
- Human tissue relevance: Isolated from ethically sourced, non-transplantable donor lungs
- Diverse applications: Target engagement, off-target profiling, and safety pharmacology
- Compliant with GLP: Available as a GLP-validated assay for regulatory submission
Evidence-Based Approach
In a collaborative study with Enterprise Therapeutics (Danahay et al., 2020), REPROCELL scientists demonstrated that TMEM16A potentiators and inhibitors had no effect on human pulmonary artery contractility, validating the specificity of the assay system and distinguishing true pharmacological effects from off-target responses. This finding strengthens confidence in the assay's ability to differentiate compound-specific vascular effects, even when targeting ion channels implicated in smooth muscle function.
Applications:
This assay is highly adaptable for early-stage safety pharmacology screens, mechanistic studies on vasoreactivity, and the evaluation of drug-induced vascular effects in compounds developed for respiratory, cardiovascular, or systemic indications. Its ability to detect both vasoconstrictive and vasodilatory responses in human tissue makes it an essential tool for predicting clinical relevance and minimizing off-target effects during drug development.
Pulmonary artery tone assays in our catalog
Determine whether your test article causes changes in the vascular tone of human pulmonary arteries.