More Decellularized Lungs Demonstrated

Following on from a demonstration of decellularized rat lungs, another team has produced similar work: "Researchers have been able to create tiny mouse lungs in the lab that are able to breathe. The lungs were created with stem cells and attached to a ventilator. ... They used a technique called decellularization, similar to the method used to create a beating mouse heart in a different lab at the University of Minnesota in 2008. In the cancer center, they took a mouse lung and stripped away all its cells. Then, injected the natural framework with stem cells. At first they used fetal mouse lung cells, but this year they had another breakthrough using adult stem cells called 'induced pluriopotent stem cells.' ... That's basically a cell that we can take from anybody and re-program to act like an embryonic stem cell ... The hope is one day human lungs could be re-created for transplant with a greater chance of success. Right now, there is no tissue matching for lung transplants. ... The beauty of that is that you can then create a tissue for an organ that's transplantable that is derived from the patient and therefore would not be recognized as foreign by the immune system and not rejected. By adding the ventilator to make the lungs breathe, the stem cells are further trained to act like lung cells. It's a huge success considering lungs are such complicated organs with some 60 different kinds of cells."

Link: http://wcco.com/health/lungs.stem.cells.2.1774895.html

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