Abstract

Disease relevant in vitro models are critical for novel therapeutic target identification and validation. Comprehensive validation remains the exception rather than the rule for models and their constituent reagents. For studies of targets in complex primary cell models, such as Air Liquid Interface (ALI) cultured bronchial epithelial cells, the problem is exacerbated by extended cell culture times.This limits the ease and scale at which individual experiments can be undertaken and leads to heterogeneity between different experiments. Recent innovations in single cell technologies enable enhanced qualification of these types of models. Here, we describe the impact of phenotypic characterisation by image cytometry in conjunction with single cell sequencing on the validation of an ALI model of bronchial epithelia. Using these techniques we generated a transcriptomic, proteomic and phenotypic fingerprint of the cellular composition of our model. This fingerprint enabled the model to be validated by comparison to cells from human bronchial epithelial tissue.