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  • What if we could drastically improve how we treat the lung, from a chronic disease like

  • asthma or emphysema, to the underdeveloped lung of a premature infant?

  • Researchers at the University of Michigan have brought us one step closer, by using

  • stem cells and a biomaterial scaffold to grow mature human lung tissue.

  • Medical research has been moving fast towards the creation of what are calledorganoids

  • which are essentially tiny balls of human tissue that resemble organs.

  • They have some similar structures, but are in no way complete or fully functional.

  • So far, scientists have successfully grown a number of different varieties of these organoids,

  • like those resembling the kidney, the gastrointestinal tract and even the brain.

  • But it gets challenging for organs with more elaborate structures.

  • Here’s a biomedical engineer to break it down:

  • The lung has a really complex architecture and that architecture is just critical to

  • its function.

  • It provides the ability for there to be certain blood passing through, air on the other side

  • to allow for the oxygen exchange with the blood.

  • And that combination of multiple cellular types, the architecture and function, and

  • getting all of those aspects to be recapitulated, that’s the major challenge with something

  • as complex as the lung.”

  • Scientists grow organoids a variety of ways, but most often they start with stem cells.

  • These are cells that have the potential to develop into any cell type in the body, given

  • the right instructions.

  • The scientists take the stem cells and mix them with various proteins and steroids, which

  • tell the stem cells what type of tissue to form.

  • This is how the researchers at Michigan began developing the lung organoids.

  • Once the organoid started to grow, they had the option to either let it continue maturing

  • in the petri dish, called anin vitroenvironment, or they could implant it into

  • a host organism’s tissue, anin vivoenvironment.

  • They tried both, but the tissue remained immature in each case.

  • It just wasn’t developing the structures you would expect to see in the lung, like

  • a network of airways.

  • Briana Dye, the lead author on this study, was running out of options.

  • So I was kind of losing hope at this point.

  • And, we tried the scaffold, we put it in the fat pad, and we looked at 4 weeks after, and

  • the tissue was still there, it wasn’t fully mature.

  • But I was like, okay, were getting somewhere.

  • So we took it out to eight weeks, and I was amazed.

  • I was amazed at seeing all the cell types that were there.

  • So the scaffold was what really had the tissue to take off in vivo.”

  • The scaffold as we had made it in this particular instance is a material that was

  • just very highly porous.

  • And so it very much looks like kind of the porosity that you would see with a kitchen

  • sponge.

  • And the cells can just be loaded in very easily, seeded, it provides supports for cell attachment.

  • And then the material actually goes away over time.

  • It’s made of these biodegradable polymers, the same material that biodegradable sutures

  • are made out of.”

  • So the lung organoids then went in through the pores and adhered to the scaffold and

  • then was able to grow together and form this kind of ball of tissue that had these

  • airway-like structures throughout it.”

  • The successful results from this study are very fundamental in nature, meaning it will

  • likely take years of continued research along many different paths for its effects to reach

  • actual patients.

  • But the possibilities of more effective drugs and regenerative lung tissue are now very

  • real thanks to this new lung tissue model.

What if we could drastically improve how we treat the lung, from a chronic disease like

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