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Inside the Effort To Print Lungs and Breathe Life Into Them With Stem Cells (technologyreview.com)
United Therapeutics, a startup that sells drugs to treat lung ailments, plans to use a 3-D printer to manufacture human lungs in "unlimited quantities." Bioprinting isn't a new idea. 3-D printers can make human skin, even retinas. Yet the method has been limited to tissues that are very small or very thin and lack blood vessels. From a report: United instead is developing a printer that it believes will be able, within a few years, to manufacture a solid, rubbery outline of a lung in exquisite detail, including all 23 descending branches of the airway, the gas-exchanging alveoli, and a delicate network of capillaries. A lung made from collagen won't help anyone: it's to a real lung what a rubber chicken is to an actual hen. So United is also developing ways to impregnate the matrix with human cells so they'll attach and burrow into it, bringing it alive.
[...] United has already made some risky organ bets. One of its subsidiaries, Revivicor, supplies surgeons with hearts, kidneys, and lungs from genetically engineered pigs (these have been used in baboons, so far). Another, Lung Bioengineering, refurbishes lungs from human donors by pumping warm solution into them. About 250 people have already received lungs that would otherwise have been designated medical waste. Don't expect fully manufactured organs soon. United, in its company projections, predicts it won't happen for another 12 years. United CEO Martine Rothblatt acknowledges that the printed structure I saw is just a start. "It's only two branches and no cells," she says.
[...] United has already made some risky organ bets. One of its subsidiaries, Revivicor, supplies surgeons with hearts, kidneys, and lungs from genetically engineered pigs (these have been used in baboons, so far). Another, Lung Bioengineering, refurbishes lungs from human donors by pumping warm solution into them. About 250 people have already received lungs that would otherwise have been designated medical waste. Don't expect fully manufactured organs soon. United, in its company projections, predicts it won't happen for another 12 years. United CEO Martine Rothblatt acknowledges that the printed structure I saw is just a start. "It's only two branches and no cells," she says.
How long before we have to beg for lungs and mortgage our homes just to breathe?
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...of which the basis is profiting from unmet need.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How long before we have to beg for lungs and mortgage our homes just to breathe?
Just until the US gets a conscience and starts treating health care as a fundamental human right and providing care to all their citizens without them risking bankruptcy. Seriously, if you have a single payer health care system like most of the civilized world this isn't a problem.
figuring out how to make the replacement lungs only last 1 year, so the patients have to pay over and over.
Wow, cynical much?
Not really - a lung transplant is a major procedure. Doing it more than a few times would likely kill the patient.
If they can use humans' own cells to print the lungs, they can do away with the rejection issue...
Nobody seems to have a sense of humor, and some of the responses seem outright delusional.
Or maybe you just weren't being as funny as you think you were. Happens to all of us sometimes especially online where tone is hard to convey... Admittedly joking about people mortgaging their homes to buy a lung is tough to pull off successfully unless you are standing on a stage in a comedy club.
Given medical corporations raise drug prices on old drugs 10X, maybe you are gullible.
Yeah yeah drug companies are greedy, news at 11... You really think lung transplants are the same thing? Here's a clue - drugs have big capital costs to develop but cost very little to replicate. There is no way a lab grown lung is going to be cheap to manufacture or easily sold multiple times since it involves major surgery. Nobody is going to be able to afford this treatment without insurance and insurance sure as hell isn't going to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a lung that doesn't last. You're basically arguing that insurance companies aren't profit motivated.
No eventually 3d print a body (AKA sleeve) and transfer the brain
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
And then, since no one can make money on it, no innovation occurs.
You seriously think no medical innovations come out of Europe or Japan or China or that companies there make no money on drugs or medical devices? If you think that then you'd be wildly wrong.
Even with fetal stem cells, it's still worth it. Abortions will happen, legal or not. Might as well derive some use from them. This being said, the goal is to grow lungs from a patient's OWN stem cells -- removes the risk of rejection.
Yeah, but small price to pay to be able to start smoking again!!!
[BAEG]
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yeah, but small price to pay to be able to start smoking again!!!
Apparently you never heard of other conditions which cause severe and irrecoverable damage to the lungs that have nothing to do with smoking.
At least smokers' lungs can potentially heal (providing they haven't developed COPD).
Why copy the brain? Figure out how to get it to self-repair and literally plug it into a new body...
One would likely start by doing brain-to-brain transfers and move on to a brain-to-device and then device-to-brain transfer. Once we can create "sleeves" there will be a rush to figure out a transfer process unless other technologies have been discovered to mitigate the need/desire.
Even with fetal stem cells, it's still worth it. Abortions will happen, legal or not. Might as well derive some use from them. This being said, the goal is to grow lungs from a patient's OWN stem cells -- removes the risk of rejection.
Hear hear.
Fortunately all around: Foetal stem cells, even when not rejected, tend to cause cancers when transplanted into an adult. (They get confused about what they should be doing.) Meanwhile, pluripotent stem cells from the patient (with pluripotency induced or just the right cells found) are really good at figuring out and doing the right thing if given a few chemical hints. Print the right growth factors into the right spots in the scaffold and/or spit the right cells into various places, and they just work together to build what should be the final organ. Immune compatibility comes with the package. (Even if the patient has autoimmune issues, starting with his own tissue may require fewer compensating adjustments than staring with a stock cell culture.)
Foetal stem cells were important for research into the mechanisms of differentiation, growth, and repair. They are a lot farther back in the process than anything you can harvest from someone who has been grown to term and born, so you don't have to guess about how the early stages worked. Once the mechanisms are figured out, though, using a patient's own cells (or a compatible line derived from a voluntary donor), poking them into the right stage and branch of development, seems to have advantages beyond avoiding offence to common moral codes.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is probably the most interesting 'News for Nerds' in the past month - yet almost no comments, and those posted are attempting to be funny.
Where did Slashdot go?
Tell me about it. B-b
Unfortunately, those afflicted with the left-wing meme set - a descendant of Stalinism - have gone into a full-court press on social pressure, in every venu where they can rant.
That leaves the non-afflicted among us (along with those afflicted with competing memes) with a choice between:
* letting the SJWs rant unopposed (and use Slashdot as yet another indoctrination tool) or
* replying to them (providing a sanity check and moral support for those not yet inducted into their religion, at the cost of continuing each digression and inflating its volume).
Some of us think that opposing tyranny is worth standing up and being counted, even if it dilutes our beloved forum's information content.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's easy to get big numbers when you discard reasonable assumptions, such as "most connections are local."
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