Bioengineered lungs have been grown in a Texas lab and transplanted into adult pigs with no medical complication. This could begin solving the human transplant problem starting in about 5 years. They could grow lungs to transplant into people in compassionate use circumstances within five to 10 years.
Transplant organs were recovered from 10,281 deceased donors—more than a 3% increase from 2016 and a 27% increase over the last 10 years. There were a total of 34,768 transplants performed in 2017 using organs from both deceased and living donors—a new record for organ transplants in the United States. At Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, there are ongoing clinical trials where people are given organs from donors who are infected with hepatitis C. After the transplant, recipients take a drug that will clear them of the disease. So far, the trial is having positive results.
Another reason for the increase is the rise in drug overdose deaths across the US.
There are about 115,000 people in the USA waiting for transplants.
In 2014, Joan Nichols and Joaquin Cortiella from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston were the first research team to successfully bioengineer human lungs in a lab. In a paper now available in Science Translational Medicine, they provide details of how their work has progressed from 2014 to the point no complications have occurred in the pigs as part of standard preclinical testing.
“The number of people who have developed severe lung injuries has increased worldwide, while the number of available transplantable organs have decreased,” said Cortiella, professor of pediatric anesthesia. “Our ultimate goal is to eventually provide new options for the many people awaiting a transplant,” said Nichols, professor of internal medicine and associate director of the Galveston National Laboratory at UTMB.
To produce a bioengineered lung, a support scaffold is needed that meets the structural needs of a lung. A support scaffold was created using a lung from an unrelated animal that was treated using a special mixture of sugar and detergent to eliminate all cells and blood in the lung, leaving only the scaffolding proteins or skeleton of the lung behind. This is a lung-shaped scaffold made totally from lung proteins.
The cells used to produce each bioengineered lung came from a single lung removed from each of the study animals. This was the source of the cells used to produce a tissue-matched bioengineered lung for each animal in the study. The lung scaffold was placed into a tank filled with a carefully blended cocktail of nutrients and the animals’ own cells were added to the scaffold following a carefully designed protocol or recipe. The bioengineered lungs were grown in a bioreactor for 30 days prior to transplantation. Animal recipients were survived for 10 hours, two weeks, one month and two months after transplantation, allowing the research team to examine development of the lung tissue following transplantation and how the bioengineered lung would integrate with the body.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Solved not shelved ..
Nothing substantial is going to be shelved until we stop restricting the use of stem cells
If the organs of healthy athletes were available then we wouldn’t have this need in the first place.
Now if you have a cheap and easily grown ANIMAL that has such an organ in a high performance for a human state, THEN you might be on to something. A 200 kg pig for example may well have lungs that would be considered olympic class for a 75kg human.
But then, as various people have pointed out, these scaffold grown organs are still way below par in terms of function. We may need to use the scaffold of a 200 kg pig just to reach the level of 25% healthy human lung function.
I once dropped to sub 10% lung function myself for a month or so. It wasn’t fun at all. Getting back to 25% of normal was fantastic. You can operate perfectly well at 25%. You can’t do any exercise. Just hurrying across a road leaves you short of breath. But sitting around, or walking to the next room, or eating, now doesn’t push you to the point of going into oxygen debt.
No. The concept is odious and implementation inexcusable. In fact, to suggest it is mere trolling.
Just answering.
I think it’s doubtful there will be a large supply of athlete organ scaffolds. In any case, while I think they will get this to work, but I don’t think it will ever be as good as a healthy original. They’re taking cells, which normally develop in a specific pattern of growth with various proximal and distal molecular signals governing their cellular arrangement in a mathematically defined unfolding that takes years, and just jamming them into a matrix and hoping that’ll provide a sort of workaround hack. And it sort of works, but there’s no reason to expect such a wildly different process to yield the exact same result. Keep in mind that in the medical field, they’re mostly targeting “good enough to live”.
They actually never investigated the rate of gas exchange supported by these lungs, or long term health. They necropsied them after 2 months, and noted that the transplants still weren’t capable of supporting the animals at that time. We still don’t know how long it would take the transplants to fully develop, what sort of complications they might experience over time, or if the new lungs would ever fully catch up to the capacity of a healthy lung.
They actually never investigated the rate of gas exchange supported by these lungs, or long term health. They necropsied them after 2 months, and noted that the transplants still weren’t capable of supporting the animals at that time. We still don’t know how long it would take the transplants to fully develop, what sort of complications they might experience over time, or if the new lungs would ever fully catch up to the capacity of a healthy lung.
I think they will get this to work, but I don’t think it will ever be as good as the original. They’re taking cells, which normally develop in a specific pattern of growth with various proximal and distal molecular signals governing their cellular arrangement in a fractal unfolding that takes years, and just jamming them into a matrix and hoping that’ll provide a sort of workaround hack. And it sort of works, but there’s no reason to expect such a wildly different process to yield the exact same result. Keep in mind that in the medical field, they’re mostly targeting “good enough to live”.
If we agree that it is right to improve and expand this technology to create more generated organs, to save more lives, then is it therefore moral and just to boycott the donor organ industry by refusing to donate your organs upon death? Just asking…
This approach suggests not just providing a replacement organ, but a significantly improved one. Suppose we take the heart of a particularly gifted athlete, and use it as a scaffold for a new heart made from the stem cells of the ultimate recipient. This recipient would then have a higher performance part.