Lab-Engineered Lungs
August 25, 2015 | Terry Sharrer
Bioengineers at Arizona State University have conducted lung regeneration studies that look promising. They describe it as this: “The idea is to remove the cells from a donor lung extracted from a cadaver, reseed the remaining decellularized scaffold with stem cells from the patient, allow the cells to adhere to the scaffold, grow and mature into the different cell types found in the functioning lung, and transplant the freshly developed, functioning organ in a living organism.” While this may be a long time before coming to human medicine, the idea of a virtually unlimited supply of functional lungs for transplantation into patients with, say, COPD, compels the research to move forward. MORE
Image Credit: commons.wikimedia.org