Bioengineered lungs have been successfully transplanted into pigs, in an advance that doctors hope will increase the number of organs available for humans. For the first time, a team of US scientists was able to grow a lung, along with working blood vessels, and then keep it breathing inside a pig. They said that they now hoped to do the same in humans within five to ten years and so help to reduce the long waiting times for people awaiting lung transplants. The technique will still rely on donors though. Although they are built in a laboratory, the lungs are not constructed from scratch. Instead, for a paper in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the researchers used two pig lungs for each pig. One
The scientists have successfully transplanted bioengineered lungs into a pig , with plans to do the same with humans in between five and ten years , thereby reducing the waiting time for lung transplants . The lungs and working blood vessels were grown in a laboratory , using separate pig lungs to provide the protein scaffold and the cells to cover it . It is hoped the process could repair damaged lungs , enabling them to be used in transplants . The scientists aim to use the technique to treat babies born without lungs by using a lung from the mother , or stem cells from the baby .