- Category: Science & Technology
(Credit: iStockphoto/Sebastian Kaulitzki) ScienceDaily.com — Research shows that growing new lungs may be possible by seeding embryonic stem cells into "acellular" lungs -- organs whose original cells have been destroyed, leaving behind empty, lung-shaped scaffolds of structural proteins. For someone with a severe, incurable lung disorder such as cystic fibrosis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung transplant may be the only chance for survival. Unfortunately, it's often not a very good chance. Matching donor lungs are rare, and many would-be recipients die waiting for the transplants that could save their lives.
Such deaths could be prevented if it were possible to use stem cells to grow new lungs or lung tissue. Specialists in the emerging field of tissue engineering have been hard at work on this for years. But they've been frustrated by the problem of coaxing undifferentiated stem cells to develop into the specific cell types that populate different locations in the lung.
Now, researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have demonstrated a potentially revolutionary solution to this problem. As they describe in an article published electronically ahead of print by the journal Tissue Engineering Part A, they seeded mouse embryonic stem cells into "acellular" rat lungs -- organs whose original cells had been destroyed by repeated cycles of freezing and thawing and exposure to detergent...MORE...
