With the sheer number of people waiting in the organ donor list for a viable lung, medical researchers have been hard pressed to come up with a method to keep up with the demand. Scientists from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston have finally succeeded in growing a pair of human lungs in a lab.
Successfully growing organs in a lab is one of the holy grails of medicine. Due to the fact that the organs used in transplant surgeries come from human donors, many people often die while waiting before viable organs become available through organ donor programs. The capability to grow human organs has the potential to save thousands, if not millions of lives in the future.
"The most exciting part is to shorten the time people have to wait for an organ transplant," said Dr. Joaquin Cortiella, an anesthesiologist from the UTMB.
Researchers have been working on the problem for years. However, the research team from the UTMB has now solved the problem by using a damaged lung as a base.
"We removed all the cells, all the material in it, and just left the skeleton of the lung, or the scaffold, behind - the pieces of the lungs that are no cells," said UTMB lead researcher Dr. Joan Nichols. "That's why it's so white and pretty and there's no blood in it, it's very pretty looking. And then we added back cells from another lung that couldn't be used for transplant but still had some viable cells in it."
The researchers also made use of a piece of equipment that was built by one of the team members using a store-bought fish tank. Dr. Michael Riddle from the UTMB made the contraption that sped up the procedure significantly. With Riddle's equipment, the team was able to speed up the growing process from four months to three days.
The piece of equipment Dr. Riddle made is the first of its kind. Riddle chose a specific type of fish tank that was close to the shape needed to grow human lungs. The researchers then filled the tank with nutritional fluid to provide the necessary nutrients for growing the organ. To aerate the fluid, the researchers also used a marine bubbler that can be bought in most pet stores.
While the team's success can be considered as a breakthrough in medicine, the team said that it would take around 10 to 15 years before the process could be tested in humans. However, the researchers also said that animal testing could begin in the next two or three years.
