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International Congress of Toxicology (ICT) 2010
Currently, most in vitro testing for genotoxicity caused by cigarette smoke is performed using submerged non-human cell cultures. In an effort to improve the cell culture model, we used human lung epithelial cells and grew them on microwell fittings, which induces a more organotypical differentiation. In an effort to improve the exposure model, we then exposed the cells to cigarette smoke in the in vitro single cell gel electrophoresis assay (comet assay) using a novel air-liquid interface exposure system, which better simulates the exposure in inhalation studies. The exposure system (Vitrocell®) consists of a smoking robot, a dilution system, and an exposure chamber with 24 MicroWell fittings for higher throughput. Two human lung epithelial cell lines, BEAS-2B and A549, were exposed to different flows of freshly generated, diluted mainstream smoke from the reference cigarette 3R4F. A clear dose-dependent increase in DNA-damage, expressed as tail intensity, was obtained in all experiments for both cell lines (p ≤ 0.001), with A549 cells demonstrating a higher resistance to genotoxic insults than BEAS-2B cells. Reproducibility and repeatability were acceptable, with a relative standard deviation of approximately 25%. The study shows that the in vitro comet assay in combination with the Vitrocell 24® air-liquid exposure system is able to detect cigarette-smoke-induced DNA damage in a reproducible and repeatable manner with a high throughput.
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Reduced Risk Products ("RRPs”) is the term we use to refer to products that present, are likely to present, or have the potential to present less risk of harm to smokers who switch to these products versus continuing smoking. PMI has a range of RRPs in various stages of development, scientific assessment and commercialization. All of our RRPs are smoke-free products that deliver nicotine with far lower quantities of harmful and potentially harmful constituents than found in cigarette smoke.