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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 14 2020, @08:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the oink-oink dept.

Damaged Human Lungs Can Be Repaired by Attaching Them to Pigs, Experiment Shows:

The sad reality of terminal lung illnesses is that there are simply far more patients than there are donor lungs available. This isn't just because of the low number of donors, which would be problem enough, but many donor lungs are significantly damaged, rendering them unusable.

By using a new experimental technique, though, such a damaged lung has now been restored to function - by sharing its circulatory system with that of a living pig. This leverages the body's self-repair mechanisms to exceed the capabilities of current donor lung restoration techniques.

"It is the provision of intrinsic biological repair mechanisms over long-enough periods of time that enabled us to recover severely damaged lungs that cannot otherwise be saved," say the lead researchers, surgeon Ahmed Hozain and biomedical engineer John O'Neill of Columbia University.

[...] In 2017, O'Neill led the development of the xenogeneic (cross-species) cross-circulation platform. Last year, two of the researchers, biomedical engineer Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic of Columbia University and surgeon Matthew Bacchetta of the Vanderbilt Lung Institute, led a study in which they restored damaged pig lungs by attaching them to other pigs.

Earlier this year, the team extended the operation time of the platform to four days.

Now, the researchers have revealed that they have successfully used the same technique to repair five damaged human lungs by connecting them to pigs, including one severely injured lung that had failed to recover function using EVLP.

"We were able to recover a donor lung that failed to recover on the clinical ex vivo lung perfusion system, which is the current standard of care," Vunjak-Novakovic said. "This was the most rigorous validation of our cross-circulation platform to date, showing great promise for its clinical utility."

[...] It's not quite ready for clinical use, though. For one, the pigs could share things other than their blood. Like disease, for instance.

Because of this, any clinical use of the technique would require medical-grade animals, which would not be cheap - but it's nonetheless something that is under investigation for use in xenotransplantation, in which pigs' organs can be transplanted in human recipients. (This is currently being tested in baboons.)

The other option is that the human recipients themselves could potentially become the basis for the cross-circulation platform, being attached to the lungs they will themselves receive, and maybe even other kinds of organs one day.

"Modifications to the xenogeneic cross-circulation circuit could enable investigation and recovery of other human organs, including livers, hearts, kidneys and limbs," the researchers wrote in their paper.

"Ultimately, we envision that xenogeneic cross-circulation could be utilised as both a translational research platform to augment transplantation research and as a biomedical technology to help address the organ shortage by enabling the recovery of previously unsalvageable donor organs."

Journal Reference:
Ahmed E. Hozain, John D. O’Neill, Meghan R. Pinezich, et al. Xenogeneic cross-circulation for extracorporeal recovery of injured human lungs, Nature Medicine (DOI: 10.1038/s41591-020-0971-8)


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 14 2020, @10:52PM (7 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 14 2020, @10:52PM (#1021533) Journal

    I mean, a lung needs to be repaired. You can't just go out to the pig farm, leave a lung, and come back in a week to pick it up?

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  • (Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday July 15 2020, @12:01AM (2 children)

    by Opportunist (5545) on Wednesday July 15 2020, @12:01AM (#1021562)

    And in the meantime you breathe through your spleen or what's the plan? I don't know about you, but holding my breath for a week could be difficult.

    • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday July 15 2020, @12:15AM (1 child)

      by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 15 2020, @12:15AM (#1021572)

      He said _a_ lung, most people have two, so, logically if you act when you only have one lung damaged you could breathe with the other one while your damaged one is being repaired at the pig farm.

      'course that's not what TFA is actually about, the idea is that you die first (and therefore don't _need_ to breathe), your damaged lungs are left at the pig farm for repair and are then given, nice and shiny like new, to someone else to breathe with. But RunAway probably knows that.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @07:30AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @07:30AM (#1021763)

        He said _a_ lung, most people have two, so

        ... if you need one lung repaired with help of a pig because you are too weak yourself, it probably means that removing a lung would kill you.

        Secondly, lung transplants are a MAJOR surgery that has MAJOR consequences, like needing fluid removed from your lungs because all the proper nerve connections are now fucked up. A lung is not cutting off your finger and attaching it to a foot. It actually is a very complicated organ.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @01:49AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @01:49AM (#1021627)

    You've got two of them, other than the fact that having a lung removed and replaced both being major operations, there's no inherent reason why it couldn't be done. In practice, I doubt it would ever be done just because of the risk involved of having two surgeries in a relatively short period of time.

  • (Score: 2) by Kitsune008 on Wednesday July 15 2020, @02:30AM

    by Kitsune008 (9054) on Wednesday July 15 2020, @02:30AM (#1021660)

    No.
    You need to keep the pig company while it's attached and doing repairs.
    I'd suggest packing along some lipstick(for the pig), and a supply of booze and condoms(for you), to make the week go by more pleasantly. ;-)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @03:52AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @03:52AM (#1021711)

    I mean, a lung needs to be repaired. You can't just go out to the pig farm, leave a lung, and come back in a week to pick it up?

    No of course not! You have to fuck the beast in its sorry ass then stab a metal straw in its neck, drink out its blood and announce domination over all of nature. That is the path to healing.