Around 50 million people worldwide live with lung diseases in
their end stage. In most cases only a transplantation of a healthy
lung may save the patient. The supply of healthy donor lungs,
however, is very limited. 80 % of the lungs to be donated are too
damaged once the donor is diagnosed dead. One big hope is therefore
that at some point it will be possibly to artificially create lungs
that could substitute these donor lungs.
Two separate groups of scientists now have made a great step
towards this vision. A few weeks ago Thomas Petersen and his team
from the Yale University in New Haven managed to create a primitive
lung that lasted for about two hours. Experiments by the Austrian
Harald Ott and scientists from the Massachusetts General Hospital
in Boston proved even more successful as they succeeded in
transplanting an artificial lung into a rat that worked for 6
hours.
Already in 2008, Harald Ott built up a reputation as a
'bioengineer' as he accomplished to create a working rat heart. The
process of 'tissue engineering' used back then with hearts and now
with lungs was the same. In both cases the organ was extracted from
a dead body, in this case a rat. Subsequently, the scientists
cleaned it from all remaining body cells leaving them with a matrix
of proteins and carbons. This matrix was recultivated in a
bio-reactor with body cells from the rat that was to receive the
organ. The result was a fully functioning organ that could be
transplanted into the recipient body.
Despite these successes, it will take years before such a
procedure could be conducted with humans. Ott's team
nevertheless underlines that the need for such procedures is
overwhelming given the fact that roughly "only one out of four
patients waiting for a lung undergo transplantation".