Breathing New Life into Old Lungs

Living lung: A rat lung, grown from the scaffold of an old lung seeded with healthy cells, is mechanically ventilated in a bioreactor. At the end of a week, the lung was transplanted into a rat, and was able to exchange gases, as a normal lung would, for two hours. Credit: Thomas Petersen and Laura Niklason, Yale University

For the first time, researchers have built a functioning lung by growing cells on the skeleton of a donor lung. The engineered organ was transplanted in a live rat, where it exchanged carbon dioxide with oxygen in the blood--just as a normal lung would--for two hours. The study is the first proof that old lung scaffolds can be used as a scaffold on which new lung tissue can grow.

Lung tissue does not regenerate, so the only way to replace a damaged lung, for example in those with emphysema and cystic fibrosis, is by transplant. "But it's a difficult procedure and there aren't enough lungs to go around for transplants," says Laura Niklason, professor of anesthesiology and biomedicine at Yale University and the corresponding author on the study. Only about 10 percent of patients who have undergone a transplant survive after 10 years, with infection and organ rejection being major problems. Growing lungs by combining a donor lung seeded with a patient's own lung cells could decrease the chance of rejection, and potentially improve the success of lung transplants.

To read the full, original article click on this link: Technology Review: Breathing New Life into Old Lungs

Author: Nidhi Subbaraman