New hope for people who need transplants: Successfully cultivate new lungs

Scientists have cultivated the pig's lungs from the animal's own cells in the laboratory.

Lung transplantation can save thousands of lives every year, but the source of organs is very limited and most patients will die while waiting for organs from donors.

Recently, scientists at Texas Medical Branch at Galveston created and paired four large lungs that developed their own blood vessels after transplantation, an achievement that could bring hope to countless patients. .

Many difficulties in lung transplantation

There are 1,455 people waiting for the lungs on the Organ Sharing Network (UNOS) list.

Even for the top of the list, the steps needed to get a new lung or two are very tiring, and the transplant must always ensure success.

Patients who are waiting for new lungs often have very severe illness, so the use of immunosuppressive drugs needed to prevent the body from removing new lungs will cause significant dangers.

In addition, the donor's lungs must be repaired to match the recipient.

But one of the main advantages of a person's lungs is that they are fully equipped with active blood vessels that surgeons must carefully reconnect when transplanting.

While recent advances have enabled scientists to cultivate many organs - including the lungs - in the laboratory using patients' cells to ensure perfect fit, the technology has met It is very difficult to imitate the extremely complex and sophisticated blood vessels of organic lungs.

When biotech lung transplant attempts are made on small animals, they often fail for this reason.

Scientists at Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have used a variety of complex devices to 'grow' pig lungs, created from the cells of the transplanted pig, in a bioreactor.

New lung feeding - Medical breakthrough

The research team at the University of Texas in Galveston may eventually find a way to allow these sophisticated blood vessels to grow and function at recipients.

To do this, they used lung cells from pigs that were not included in the study to make the supporting frame, or basic shape of the new lung, and then used the cells from each of the four animals in the Research for new lung cultures fits perfectly with them.

An internal organ is essential to creating a new lung with all its constituents, working best when it is made only of lung proteins.

But if there is any trace of the animal from which it was removed, the new body will no longer fit perfectly for the animal to receive and can be eliminated.

So scientists cleaned the cells of the support frame, washed them in a combination of sugar and detergent so that only the proteins remained, a process called cell reduction.

They then placed the support frame into a bucket and poured it over several stages in a 'mixture' of cells and nutrients of the receiving pig, carefully following the procedure, or formula, for a lung.

For 30 days, they watched carefully as each lung developed.

They are finally ready to be transplanted, which is when scientists see evidence that their unique formula has worked.

The secret to these lungs is that they continue to develop after transplantation, so that a new network of blood vessels will grow and spread throughout the lungs.

Only two weeks after transplantation, scientists found that cultivated "germs" developed into strong networks to carry blood through the lungs.

They followed pigs for 10 hours, two weeks, one month and two months after transplanting, and found that the lab organs worked well and only seemed to continue to improve.

'We do not see signs of pulmonary edema, often a sign of insufficient vascular system'.

" Biological lung continues to develop after transplantation without transmitting any growth factor, the body provides all the materials that the lungs need," the researchers said.

The new lungs can fully saturate oxygen, although they cannot fully test this because each pig still has an initial lung and even after two months the lungs are not fully mature without There is that lung.

Researchers think that with proper funding, the lungs like the ones they have developed for pigs can be 'cultivated' for humans to use in studies in the next 5 to 10 years.

But this method needs to be tested in more than 4 pigs, and they need to be kept alive and monitored much longer to prove that the lungs really live.