From the physics of a child's soap bubble, South Korean researchers at POSTECH have drawn a principle capable of reshaping how humanity studies its own fragility. By engineering an ultrathin hydrogel membrane that stretches and contracts like living alveoli, Professor Sungjune Jung's team has created an artificial lung that not only holds its structure through 240,000 breathing cycles but reveals, for the first time in a laboratory setting, how motion itself shapes the way lung cells respond to disease. In a field long constrained by static models and imperfect proxies, this device offers some
Researchers develop breathing artificial lung inspired by soap bubbles
A soap bubble is thin, yet it doesn't burst easily and moves freely.
Mark
Why does motion matter so much? Can't you just grow lung cells in a dish and test drugs on them?
Mimi
You can, but you're missing something fundamental. In your body, lung cells are constantly being stretched and relaxed as you breathe. That mechanical signal—the physical movement itself—changes how cells behave, how they grow, how they respond to threats. A static dish doesn't capture that. It's like studying how a heart works by looking at heart cells that never contract.
Mark
So this soap bubble idea—how does that actually solve the problem? Why not just use rubber or plastic?
Mimi
Because rubber and plastic are too stiff. They don't feel like lung tissue. The soap bubble principle works because it creates a membrane that's both incredibly thin and incredibly flexible, but also durable. It's the right balance of soft and strong.
Mark
240,000 breaths sounds like a lot. How long is that in real time?
Mimi
Depends on how fast you run the cycles. But the point is it's enough to prove the device won't fail after a few weeks of lab use. Researchers need tools that last long enough to run meaningful experiments.
Mark
The flu virus test—what did they actually discover that was new?
Mimi
That the lung's immune response to influenza changes based on whether the tissue is moving or sitting still. Static cells and moving cells fight the virus differently. That's something you couldn't have known without a device like this.
Mark
Does this replace animal testing?
Mimi
Not entirely, not yet. But it reduces the need for it. You can screen drugs and understand disease mechanisms in a human tissue model first, then move to animals only when you really need to. That's a significant shift in how drug development works.
The Pulse
- Biomedical science has long struggled to replicate the lung's essential truth: that breathing is not background noise but the very force that shapes how lung cells live, sicken, and heal.
- Existing tools — flat cell cultures and polymer-based chips — have failed to capture this dynamic reality, leaving drug testing and disease research anchored to environments that bear little resemblance to a living body.
- A POSTECH team led by Professor Sungjune Jung borrowed from the self-forming geometry of soap bubbles to produce a hydrogel membrane thin enough to mimic alveoli yet durable enough to survive hundreds of thousands of repeated expansions without tearing.
- Their pressure-driven breathing system and 3D-bioprinted three-layer tissue architecture allowed the device to expose a previously hidden finding: inflammatory and antiviral responses in lung tissue differ measurably depending on whether the tissue is in motion or at rest.
- The artificial lung now positions researchers to test drugs and model diseases — including influenza — in conditions that closely mirror the living human lung, reducing dependence on animal models and accelerating the path toward effective treatments.
From the physics of a child's soap bubble, South Korean researchers at POSTECH have drawn a principle capable of reshaping how humanity studies its own fragility. By engineering an ultrathin hydrogel membrane that stretches and contracts like living alveoli, Professor Sungjune Jung's team has created an artificial lung that not only holds its structure through 240,000 breathing cycles but reveals, for the first time in a laboratory setting, how motion itself shapes the way lung cells respond to disease. In a field long constrained by static models and imperfect proxies, this device offers something rarer than data — it offers fidelity to life.
There is something quietly profound about the fact that one of biomedical science's most persistent problems found its answer in a child's soap bubble. The way a thin liquid film holds its shape, stretches without breaking, and responds to the softest pressure gave Professor Sungjune Jung and his team at POSTECH — South Korea's Pohang University of Science and Technology — the conceptual key they needed to build a lung that actually breathes.
Published in Advanced Materials in late July 2026, their artificial lung addresses a challenge that is simple to name and enormously difficult to solve. Human lungs expand and contract tens of thousands of times each day, and that motion is not incidental — it governs how lung cells grow, function, and respond to disease. Recreating it in a laboratory has proven elusive. Traditional cell cultures grow on flat, static surfaces. Lung-on-a-chip devices came closer but relied on synthetic polymers that don't behave like real tissue. Soft hydrogels, chemically truer to actual lung material, tend to tear when formed into the ultrathin membranes the work requires.
Jung's team solved this by applying soap bubble physics to a composite hydrogel. By dipping a mold into the solution and withdrawing it, they formed a membrane that is both soft enough to stretch like real alveoli and durable enough to survive approximately 240,000 breathing cycles without failure. A pressure-based actuation system beneath the membrane replicates the mechanics of the human diaphragm — dropping pressure to draw the membrane inward, just as a real inhale works — while 3D bioprinting layered vascular cells, a basement membrane, and epithelial cells into an interior architecture that mirrors actual lung tissue.
The device's most striking finding came during influenza experiments: the inflammatory and antiviral responses of lung cells differ depending on whether the tissue is moving or still. That discovery alone reframes how researchers might approach viral lung disease. Professor Jung noted that the system can be tuned to model different breathing rates and depths, making it possible to simulate everything from a healthy lung to various disease states — a flexibility that could meaningfully reduce reliance on animal models and bring drug testing closer to the conditions of a living human body.
You've probably blown a soap bubble through a straw as a child. That simple act—the way a thin film of liquid holds its shape, stretches without tearing, and moves with the gentlest pressure—inspired a team of South Korean researchers to solve a problem that has long frustrated biomedical science: how to build a lung that actually breathes.
Professor Sungjune Jung and his colleagues at POSTECH, the Pohang University of Science and Technology, have created an artificial lung that mimics not just the structure of human lung tissue but its fundamental motion. The device operated stably through approximately 240,000 breathing cycles and, in tests, reproduced how real lung tissue responds to influenza infection. The work was published in late July 2026 in Advanced Materials, one of the field's most respected journals.
The challenge they were trying to solve is deceptively straightforward to state but enormously difficult to execute. A human lung expands and contracts tens of thousands of times each day. Those movements—the stretching and relaxing of the alveoli, the tiny air sacs where oxygen enters the bloodstream—do far more than simply move air in and out. The motion itself shapes how lung cells grow, how they function, and how they respond to disease and inflammation. To truly understand lung disease or to test whether a new drug actually works, researchers need to recreate that motion in the laboratory. But existing methods have fallen short. Traditional cell culture grows cells on flat, static surfaces that bear no resemblance to the dynamic environment of a living lung. More recent "lung-on-a-chip" technology came closer, but most versions rely on synthetic polymers that don't faithfully reproduce real lung tissue characteristics. Soft hydrogels, which are chemically closer to actual tissue, tend to tear apart during the delicate process of creating thin membranes.
The breakthrough came from an unexpected place: the physics of soap bubbles. A soap bubble is essentially a thin liquid film that forms itself, remains intact despite its fragility, and moves freely under pressure. Jung's team applied this principle to a composite hydrogel made from polymers and monomers. By dipping a mold into the hydrogel solution and withdrawing it, they created an ultrathin membrane that was soft and stretchable like real alveoli yet strong enough to endure hundreds of thousands of repeated cycles without failing.
They then engineered what they call a "breathing actuation system"—a mechanism that mimics the actual physics of human respiration. When you inhale, your diaphragm moves downward, pressure inside your lungs drops, and air flows in. The team built a system that repeatedly generates this same pressure change beneath their artificial membrane, causing it to stretch and contract in a pattern identical to a breathing lung. The membrane performed flawlessly through 240,000 cycles, a durability benchmark that suggests the device could function reliably in research settings.
The interior architecture matters just as much as the membrane itself. Using 3D bioprinting technology, the researchers constructed a three-layer structure inside the artificial lung that mirrors the actual anatomy of lung tissue: a vascular cell layer, a basement membrane layer, and an epithelial cell layer stacked in sequence. When the artificial lung "breathed," this motion was transmitted directly to the cells. In experiments with influenza virus, the artificial lung revealed something new: the inflammatory and antiviral responses of lung tissue vary depending on whether the tissue is moving or static. This finding alone suggests the device will change how researchers understand viral infection and design treatments for it.
Professor Jung emphasized the practical implications. The artificial lung allows researchers to adjust both the rate and depth of breathing, making it possible to model everything from a healthy lung to various disease states—all within a controlled laboratory environment. This opens a pathway to test drug responses in conditions that are far more realistic than simple cell cultures or animal models can provide. The research was supported by South Korea's National Research Foundation and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, positioning it as part of a broader national investment in biomedical innovation.
Notable Quotes
The breathing artificial lung allows the rate and depth of breathing to be freely adjusted, so everything from a normal lung to a range of disease states can be reproduced in the laboratory.— Professor Sungjune Jung, POSTECH
This study will change the landscape of new drug development and lung disease research.— Professor Sungjune Jung, POSTECH
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