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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 Muad'Dave on Thursday July 16 2020, @11:32AM (1 child)

    by Muad'Dave (1413) on Thursday July 16 2020, @11:32AM (#1022357)

    You left off the most important part of your quote [pennmedicine.org]: "... and treated with a bloodless solution that contains nutrients, proteins, and oxygen."

    My contention is that by using actual blood from a pig, the additional curative factors in play may already be present without the need for the rest of the pig, particularly if you use a 'once-thru' (or perhaps just a few passes thru) process instead of recycling and re-oxygenating the blood continuously.

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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday July 16 2020, @02:08PM

    by RS3 (6367) on Thursday July 16 2020, @02:08PM (#1022398)

    Thanks, and what you wrote makes sense.

    For the record, I did not leave anything off: I quoted from TFA. You got more from another source, and that's great.

    Again, I get where you're going; I'm suggesting maybe there's a dynamic process happening. Maybe the liver, or something else, or many things in the pig, are responding to something- trace enzyme, or who knows (I'm not a biologist) that's triggering a "produce a repair enzyme (or whatever it is)" response.

    A great example is infection. There's a normal range for white cell count in blood analysis. So my blood won't help someone who has an infection but has a weak immune system. And the infection doesn't have to be blood-borne, but somehow something the infection gives off (enzymes?) triggers a response in the immune system.

    If I'm right, and researchers can figure out what the lung-healing enzymes (or whatever it is) are, then we shouldn't have to connect to a live pig.