The Lung Institute, a subsidiary of Regenerative Medicine Solutions

The Lung Institute, a subsidiary of Regenerative Medicine Solutions

The Lung Institute, a subsidiary of Regenerative Medicine Solutions, opens Tuesday in downtown Tampa and will focus on providing minimally invasive stem cell therapies and other treatment options for lung ailments.

The facility on East Kennedy Boulevard and its physicians, through their practices, aim to give patients more effective ways to address pulmonary conditions, according to a statement.

The institute’s treatment options include stems cells, natural growth factors and gene therapy for repair and regeneration of lung tissue.

see more Lung Institute info here

Progress toward a artificial lung at the University of Pittsburgh

Progress toward a artificial lung at the University of Pittsburgh

For a lung transplant to be successful, donor lungs must be maintained from the moment they are harvested until the transplant. And before the transplant occurs, the recipient must maintain a level of fitness to optimize the outcome.

Because both can affect the success of a lung transplant, UPMC and University of Pittsburgh researchers and transplant surgeons are working to advance both ends of that equation.

Last month, a UPMC surgical team, led by Christian Bermudez, UPMC's chief of cardiothoracic transplantation, used the TransMedics OCS Lung -- OCS standing for Organ Care System -- in the first "breathing lung" transplant on the East Coast.

UPMC reports that the 53-year-old patient from Moundsville, W.Va., received a successful double-lung transplant required to replace organs damaged by pulmonary fibrosis and pulmonary hypertension.

OCS looks like a small cart on wheels. Once the donor organs are placed inside, it monitors pulmonary arterial pressure, ratio of the oxygen-carbon dioxide gas exchange, vascular resistance to blood flow, and other data through sensors embedded in the lungs to provide doctors with an immediate snapshot of the organs' viability for transplantation. The device also can flush the lungs to clean pollution or sputum and other fluids that collect in the lungs prior to the donor's death.

This method is designed to replace the current practice of putting donor lungs on ice with no blood circulation, which is a method described as putting the lungs to sleep. Once removed from the blood supply, the lungs can deteriorate rapidly, which can prevent their use or lead to complications for the recipient.

UPMC is seeking 10 candidates requiring lung transplants for a human clinical trial to test whether the OCS Lung produces better outcomes than using harvested lungs that were put on ice prior to transplantation, Dr. Bermudez said. Early clinical trials in Europe have shown the OCS Lung to be safe and effective.

By improving the quality of donor lungs, the OCS Lung could increase the number of lungs available for transplantation. Currently only about 15 percent of candidate lungs can be used.

"The idea and concept are attractive, and it's logical to think that maintaining perfusion [or blood flow through the harvested lungs] and temperature similar to what you see in nature and in humans eventually will improve the safety of the transplant," Dr. Bermudez said.

In the meantime, another Pitt research team, also including Dr. Bermudez but led by Pitt bioengineering professor William J. Federspiel, is working on the second prototype of a wearable artificial lung, designed to allow patients, including candidates for lung transplants, to remain more mobile while awaiting a transplant or treatment. Current immobile artificial-lung technology can keep the patient bedridden and even require sedation prior to the transplant.

Mr. Federspiel said the University of Maryland already has developed a portable artificial lung, but his team has landed a five-year $3.4 million National Institutes of Health grant to develop its lung that, he said, offers a more efficient exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, the two gases involved in respiration.

The Paracorporeal Ambulatory Assist Lung, or PAAL, "is a wearable, fully integrated blood pump and lung designed to provide longer-term respiratory support up to one to three months while maintaining excellent blood compatibility," Mr. Federspiel said. "Our design and approach has the opportunity to provide a more efficient device and more compact design."

William Wagner, director of Pitt and UPMC's McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine, is developing coatings for the artificial lung to minimize blood clotting. Mr. Federspiel said the artificial lung improves the exchange of gases with a rotating impeller near the blood intake, agitating the patient's blood and sending it over tiny polymeric fibers.

"If you can disrupt blood flow around the surface of the fibers, you can improve the rate of gas exchange," Mr. Federspiel said.
As of June 30, 2011, the United Network for Organ Sharing reported that 9,000 Americans were living with a transplanted lung. In more recent cases, patients typically receive two lungs.

The artificial lung currently in use is ECMO -- a treatment of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. Using a pump, the cardio-respiratory technique drains blood from the body then oxygenates it before returning it to the bloodstream. ECMO limits mobility, although more recent versions allow some mobility, Mr. Federspiel said.

The Pitt and UPMC projects are addressing the national problem of lung disease that claims 350,000 Americans each year, with another 150,000 requiring short- or long-term health care.

from a news memo by By David Templeton / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

read the complete articles here

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/health/research-aims-to-boost-lung-transplant-success-684480/#ixzz2RGWR2bIu

Artificial Wearable Lung

Artificial Wearable Lung to Help Patients be Mobile Before Transplant

Patients preparing for a lung transplant often end up bedridden for extended periods of time while awaiting surgery. Because poorly functioning lungs have to be continuously assisted by extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machines, mobility for the patient flies out the window. This is not only a matter of great discomfort, but lack of movement prior to surgery contributes to worse outcomes for patients that should really be ambulatory instead.

Now a collaboration of researchers headed by a team from University of Pittsburgh is developing an artificial lung and blood pump that is small and light enough to wear for up to three months.

Our wearable lung will be designed to get patients up and moving within the hospital setting, which is important for both patient recovery and improving a patient’s status prior to a lung transplant,” said principal investigator William J. Federspiel, William Kepler Whiteford Professor of Bioengineering in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering and director of the Medical Devices Laboratory within the Pitt-UPMC McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine. see more info on this wearable lung

increasing the pool of donor lungs

UA Surgeon Works to Revolutionize Organ Transplantation
What if you could take a damaged lung from a deceased patient, clean it up and refurbish it for someone in need of a transplant? Or what if you could print someone a brand new human lung using a 3-D bioprinter?

These are among the ambitious goals of Dr. Zain Khalpey, a University of Arizona cardiothoracic surgeon who wants to revolutionize organ transplantation.

Every day, an estimated 79 people in the United States receive organ transplants, but an average of 18 people die waiting for transplants because of a shortage of donated organs, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At the same time, many donor organs are routinely discarded because they are deemed unsuitable for transplant.

Khalpey, who joined the UA department of surgery this spring as an associate professor and director of clinical and translational research, hopes to change that situation. He envisions a medical landscape in which fewer organ transplants are needed in the first place, and in which organs typically disposed of as medical waste can be revitalized to help save lives.

Khalpey's second research area, organ reconditioning, focuses on increasing the pool of donor lungs for patients requiring a lung transplant by taking donor lungs that would be thrown away and making them suitable for transplant.
He is currently developing the UA's Ex Vivo Lung Program, which will explore new ways to recondition lungs from DCD (donation after cardiac death) donors, using mechanical devices and designer drugs to manipulate the metabolism of the organs and optimize them for transplantation.
This summer, the UA will serve as a national trial site for the Expand trial, comparing the survival of DCD lungs resuscitated on a mobile ex vivo circuit versus normal lungs transplanted.
In the event that an organ can't be reconditioned, Khalpey hopes it can still be put to use in his third area of research – organogenesis, which aims to grow new organs by combining an otherwise unusable donor organ with a transplant patient's own stem cells.
The idea is that a donor heart or lung could be put into detergent and decellularized so that nothing but the organ's matrix – essentially its skeleton – remains. The organ would then be seeded with the stem cells of a patient awaiting transplant and left to grow inside a special bioreactor, developed by Khalpey and his former colleagues at Harvard and Harvard Bioscience in Boston.


"A bioreactor is like a sterile, intelligent, well-controlled and monitored incubator, where one feeds and 'cooks' this organ until it reaches a point of clinical integrity ready for implantation," Khalpey said.
Khalpey and his colleagues have already used the bioreactor to successfully grow a new pig heart and lungs and they now are experimenting with human organs. The Donor Network of Arizona has pledged all the hearts and lungs it would normally throw away to help with the research efforts. With the organs that can't be reconditioned, Khalpey plans to create a "biofarm" of frozen organ cytoskeletons for use in future organogenesis research.

Khalpley also serves as director of the department of surgery's CAPTURED Biobank. His goal is to create a bank of cardiac and thoracic tissue with a stem cell directory that could be used by medical researchers worldwide. Human stem cells would be harvested during operations, with patient consent, for future use in tissue engineered heart valves, lungs and other organs.

Finally, Khalpey also is looking at the long-range possibility of creating transplantable human hearts and lungs using a 3-D bioprinter.

Three-dimensional printing, which produces three-dimensional solid objects from digital models, has been used to create things such as architectural models, jewelry and dental crowns. Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, has used the technology to engineer a lab-grown human bladder that was successfully transplanted into a patient in 2007.

Khalpey envisions doing the same thing with hearts and lungs, seeding a printed collagen or elastic organ structure with human stem cells and putting it into the bioreactor to develop.

Ultimately, Khalpey hopes his research will lead to new options for people who aren't now getting the transplants they need.

"The biggest problems right now for heart and lung transplantation are bridging the shortage of organs in the pediatric and adult arenas, increasing the donor pool and reconditioning or re-transplanting organs that have worn out due to chronic rejection," he said.

"I need to not just reform transplantation, I need to revolutionize it."

Lungs rebuilt in lab and transplanted into rats : Not Exactly Rocket Science

Nonetheless, both researchers say that the technique used to actually produce the lung was “careful, well planned and beautifully presented”. Cortiella says that it “shows the importance of using the organ’s own extracellular matrix”, while Nichols notes that it “advances our view of what a bioreactor needs to look like in order to both grow and mature lung tissue”.

And Nichols is particularly excited about the fact that other researchers are making significant headway in engineering a lung. “It is hard to make headway in a field when so few people have tried to engineer a lung,” she says. “Good science does not take place in a vacuum. You need a critical mass to move the field along.”

Lung engineering may not be a competitive field, but it’s clear that similar approaches are being tested for other organs. Just last week, another team from Massachussetts General Hospital achieved the same trick for livers, stripping them down to a scaffold, re-growing them, and transplanting them back into rats. Again, we’re a long way off from the clinic but the fact that progress is being made at all makes this a very exciting time to be alive.

Lungs rebuilt in lab and transplanted into rats : Not Exactly Rocket Science

How to Grow a New Lung | DiscoverMagazine.com

One key is getting rid of the donor's pesky cells, leaving the some critical structures behind.

A group of rats in New Haven, Connecticut, have offered living, breathing proof that scientists are learning how to grow replacements for vital organs. Earlier this year, researchers at Yale University removed the animals’ left lungs, swapping them out for new ones crafted in the lab. Although the rats survived no more than two hours, that was long enough to prove that an engineered lung could exchange gas and keep an animal alive. In a separate project, rats at Massachusetts General Hospital received cultivated livers and survived for up to eight hours before the transplant was removed.

How to Grow a New Lung | DiscoverMagazine.com

Must see video: Bionic Man Has Fully Functional Mechanical Organs:

With working organs and a realistic face, the world’s most high-tech humanoid made his debut in London yesterday and will be a one-man show at the city’s London Science Museum starting tomorrow.

The robot goes by Rex (short for robotic exoskeleton) or Million-Dollar Man (because that’s how much it cost to build him). Rex looks somewhat lifelike in that he has prosthetic hands, feet and a face modeled after a real man. That man is Swiss social psychologist Bertolt Meyer, who himself has a prosthetic hand. Such technology is now becoming more widely available to the general public.

There may be hope for me yet.......

Bionic Man Has Fully Functional Mechanical Organs : 80beats