First Transplant of Lab-Grown Lungs - Let's Smoke to That

in #science6 years ago

Seriously, ignore the second part of the title! But yeah, a recent experiment seems to have been successfully completed.

Bio-engineered lungs have been successfully transplanted into pigs for the first time. How was that possible? Well:

  1. Take pig lungs. Strip lungs until you have a scaffold of protein.
  2. The scaffold was refilled with cells from the pig receiving the transplant. This was done to avoid conducting immune suppression procedures.
  3. Then the lungs were connected to the blood circulation of the receiver.
  4. The receiver was able to breathe normally.

Research hope to see this soon in human applications. The very brief summary of it is in the video below, courtesy of NewScientist.



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Cristi Vlad Self-Experimenter and Author

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The future is now.... amazing what humans can achieve.... thanks for the hard work and effort @cristi it is much appreciated if not always shown via votes or payouts but people are paying attention.

full steem ahead!

I'm glad you share the same enthusiasm as I do about this :D Thanks for the feedback.

Holy shit! This is quite the breakthrough man! I am really surprised that the video was so short - for something like this we need a whole segment....

I was also wondering what type of cells were used to fill the 'scaffolding' the second time around. Stem cells ( for regeneration) or normal lung cells of the second pig itself or some other cell?

Id guess normal lung cells