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

#66: Synthetic Lung Takes a Breath | DiscoverMagazine.com

#66: Synthetic Lung Takes a Breath
 | DiscoverMagazine.com

3D printer makes an ear, can lungs be next?

3D printer makes an ear, can lungs be next?


Watch This: 3-D Printing an Implantable Ear : 80beats

New techology to create artificial lungs

New techology to create artificial lungs
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Professor Rhodri Williams at Swansea's College of Engineering, and was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).


domain-b.com : Researchers develop technology to create artificial lung

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The device resembles a small box with inlet and outlet pipes for blood flow. It is intended to be worn externally to assist breathing for patients with chronic illnesses including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, emphysema and cystic fibrosis.
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It is also being developed for use to assist recovery of patients following cardiopulmonary surgery and used to keep patients healthier whilst they are waiting for a lung transplant. Helping patients with breathing will enable more transplants to take place, with better matching and improved survival rates.</p>
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