New Lungs: Scientists Build a Rat Lung

Scientists Build a Rat Lung

By GAUTAM NAIK

Scientists have made partly functioning rat lungs in the laboratory, a small yet tantalizing step in the quest to create fresh body parts for transplantation or to treat disease.

A team led by researchers from Yale University took apart rats' lungs and rebuilt them with new cells in a glass jar. When transplanted into live rats for a few hours, the new organs successfully exchanged oxygen and carbon dioxide, just as natural lungs do. The findings are published in the online version of the journal Science.



Yale University

Microsurgeon Tai Yi begins the lung transplant procedure in a rat. After he takes out the normal organ, he will put in the engineered one.
The study, funded by Yale and the National Institutes of Health, builds on a handful of similar groundbreaking experiments of recent years. A breakthrough using the same technique occurred in 2008, when University of Minnesota researchers created a beating rat heart in the lab. In a June 13 paper in Nature Medicine, scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and elsewhere described how they had used the method to create a rat liver.

"It's an approach that has repeatedly been shown to have promise," said Anthony Atala, an expert in regenerative medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, who wasn't involved in the latest study. Dr. Atala cautioned, however, that it could be years or even decades before such experiments could be tried in people.