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
US 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 list for lung transplants. The new technique is based on an existing method of growing human lungs, which involves taking stem cells from pigs that are genetically identical to those used by researchers at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina. 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 biopsy from the mother, or stem cells from the baby.