Core B: Airway Epithelial Cell Culture Core Summary The primary goal of Core B Airway Epithelial Cell Culture Core is to support the Seattle Center projects by providing organotypic cultures of epithelial cells from carefully phenotyped individuals. The core is divided into a pediatric sub-core and an adult sub-core. Core personnel will identify individuals scheduled for elective surgery, explain the study, and obtain informed consent. Epithelial cells are collected from enrolled individuals at the time of elective surgery by bronchial brushing via a secure endotracheal tube. Epithelial cells are expanded in submerged culture and either stored or used immediately as needed for differentiated air-liquid interface organotypic cultures to support the co-culture model systems in the two projects. A key function of the Core is to carefully characterize individuals with asthma into T2-high and non-T2 clinical phenotypes, using pre-defined criteria for children and adults. Both sub-cores will also collect epithelial cells from healthy controls for comparisons. The pediatric sub-core will obtain additional longitudinal clinical data, allowing correlation of specific clinical phenotypes and the associated epithelial endotypes with temporal clinical data. The adult sub- core will also obtain airway cells via induced sputum, to assist in airway cell endotyping via determination of the Type 2 Gene Mean (T2GM) and to provide airway cells for single cell RNA for sequencing. The adult sub- core will also continue to expand a biorepository of adult airway epithelial cells obtained from donor lung bronchial rings, which are discarded at the time of lung transplant. This provides significantly larger numbers of cells per donor as compared to airway brushing. These cells will be provided along with assistance from the core for mechanistic studies, using gene disruption techniques such as shRNA gene silencing or CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing.