Lung-on-a-chip mircodevice light up by fluorescent dyes.
SYDNEY: In two breakthrough studies, American scientists have built a lung on a chip and successfully grown and transplanted a rat lung.
The research could help people who suffer from various lung diseases, which are often fatal due to the shortage of lung donors.
"This work represents an initial step towards the goal of creating fully functional lungs in the laboratory," said biomedical engineer Thomas Peterson from Yale University, New Haven.
How to grow a lung
Until now, scientists have been able to grow tissue, such as skin and cartilage, in a lab and transplant it into a patient. But complex organs such as lungs have remained out of their grasp.
But Peterson and his colleagues report this week that they have grown a rat lung in a lab and successfully transplanted them into rats. They published their study in the journal Science.
The left lung of a rat was 'decellularised' - that is, it was stripped of all its cells, leaving behind the basic scaffolding of the organ: its blood vessels. The researchers then introduced to the scaffold some stem cells from the rat that would receive the transplant. 20 to 25 years for human transplants
Once grown and transplanted, "the engineered lungs allowed oxygen to enter the bloodstream." The lung also removed carbon dioxide, though not as effectively as a natural lung.
But it will be "20-25 years before this approach can be attempted in human patients," Peterson said.
Biologist Miranda Grounds, at the University of Western Australia, who was not involved in the study, says that while the study has "demonstrated the principle", she cautions that it "would be exceedingly difficult to scale up to human applications."
Build a tiny model replica
In another study published in Science, Donald Ingber of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Boston, and his colleagues scaled the lung down in size to what they refer to as a "organ-on-a-chip".
At approximately the size of an Australian 10 cent piece, the device mimics the human lung.
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Friday, 25 June 2010by Emma Bastian
Cosmos Online
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