Cigarette smoking is responsible for a multitude of health risks and is one of the major modifiable risk factors for many smoking-related diseases. Tobacco Heating System (THS) is an electronic device, which heats tobacco instead of burning it. The THS aerosol has a different chemical composition to cigarette smoke, with its levels of harmful and potentially harmful constituents reduced on average by 90-95%. Advances in tissue engineering have enabled the development of sophisticated, three-dimensional organotypic culture systems that closely resemble human physiology. In several recent studies, buccal, gingival, nasal, bronchial, and small airway human epithelial organotypic cultures were exposed to aerosol from the THS and cigarette smoke. Standard toxicological assays were combined with network-based systems toxicology analyses to identify otherwise undetectable cellular-level effects. The results showed that the THS aerosol has a minimal biological impact on cells in comparison to cigarette smoke.
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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. Our RRPs are smoke-free products that produce an aerosol that contains far lower quantities of harmful and potentially harmful constituents than found in cigarette smoke.