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Science

Inside the Effort To Print Lungs and Breathe Life Into Them With Stem Cells (technologyreview.com) 57

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.

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Inside the Effort To Print Lungs and Breathe Life Into Them With Stem Cells

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  • is figuring out how to make the replacement lungs only last 1 year, so the patients have to pay over and over.

    • 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.
      • Not really - a lung transplant is a major procedure. Doing it more than a few times would likely kill the patient.

        Yeah, but small price to pay to be able to start smoking again!!!

        [BAEG]

        • by mysidia ( 191772 )

          Yeah, but small price to pay to be able to start smoking again!!!

          Apparently you never heard of other conditions [livestrong.com] 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).

    • by vlad30 ( 44644 )
      No eventually 3d print a body (AKA sleeve) and transfer the brain
  • How long before we have to beg for lungs and mortgage our homes just to breathe?
    • ...of which the basis is profiting from unmet need.

      • Isn't it the act of *meeting the need* that (rightfully) results in profit?

        • Isn't it the act of *meeting the need* that (rightfully) results in profit?

          No! It's so much better to not get needs met, as long as you stick it to the Man!

        • Isn't it the act of *meeting the need* that (rightfully) results in profit?

          That's one theory. Another theory is that it is predatory to profit from others' need, and that profit should come from adding value, not from taking advantage of people. Most of the wealth in capitalism concentrates at the top, with those who are taking advantage of others — not with the people at the bottom, who are actually doing the work that serves the need.

      • ...of which the basis is profiting from unmet need.

        You can theoretically get your replacement lung in communist countries, but it takes 5 years. If you know someone in the Party.

    • As opposed to now, when we have to die when our lungs stop working, you mean?
      • Nobody seems to have a sense of humor, and some of the responses seem outright delusional. Not internally-inconsistent, but rather trying to connect one thing to another in ways that don't hold.
        • 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.

          • Yeah but not everybody needs to buy a lung. It's not like they could monopolize air...or lungs, for that matter.
    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by ahadsell ( 248479 )

        And then, since no one can make money on it, no innovation occurs.

        • 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.

        • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

          And then, since no one can make money on it, no innovation occurs.

          Because massive and unnecessary profits to insurance companies and hospitals is how innovation occurs.....

          • Because massive and unnecessary profits to insurance companies and hospitals is how innovation occurs.....

            Massive and unnecessary profits ... so that's why hospitals go into bankruptcy.

  • If they can use humans' own cells to print the lungs, they can do away with the rejection issue...

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