Author: Maria Temming / Source: Science News
For the first time, researchers have created lungs in the lab and successfully transplanted them into pigs.
These bioengineered lungs, described online August 1 in Science Translational Medicine, developed healthy blood vessels that allowed pigs to live for several weeks after surgery without medical complications. That’s a significant improvement from previous efforts: Lab-grown lungs implanted in rodents failed within hours, before the lungs could develop the complex blood vessel network necessary for long-term survival.
If the new procedure can be adapted for humans, with bioengineered lungs grown from a patient’s own cells, that could reduce the risk of organ rejection and slash wait times for organ transplants. In the United States, where about 1,500 people currently are on a waiting list for a lung transplant, the average wait is a few months.
“This study really brings the whole research field to the next level,” says Xi “Charlie” Ren, a biomedical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh not involved in the work.
For the study, immunologist Joan Nichols at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and colleagues built lungs for four pigs by first using a sugar and detergent mixture to strip the cells from lungs of donor pigs. That left sterilized, pearly white,…
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