Health Issue: New Medicine toxins on lungs

In a first, lungs created in  lab live on in rats Washington: US scientists reported important progre4ss towards building new human lungs by successfully implanting lab-cultivated cellos into a rat's lungs, and by creating an artificial device on a microchip that mimics the human lung.          Yale University researchers  managed to create lungs that worked from 45 to 120 minutes by using laboratory-cultivated cells and implanted them into rats, a scientific first.          Separately, researchers with the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School and hildren's Hospital Boston created a device that acts like a human lung using blood vessel cells. It is about the size of a rubber eraser.          The artificial lung can be used to test the effects of new medicine and toxins on human lungs, said Wyss Institute director Donald Ingber and the study's main author. The minilung-on-a-chip" merges a number of technologies in an innovative wqay" said MIT Institute professor Robert Langer.         Both studies appear in Friday's edition of Science. For the first study, researchers took adult rat lungs and removed their existing cellular components. They preserved the matrix and branching structures of the airways and vascular system, which they later used to grow new lung cells.         "When implanted into rats for short intervals of time )45 - 120 minutes), the engineered lungs exchanged oxygen and carbon dioxide similarly to natural lungs," they said. "This is an early step in the regeneration of entire lungs for larger animals and, eventually, for humans." said lead author Laura niklason from Yale University.         Niklason however warned that it will take years of research with adult stem cells to see if lungs can be regenerated in vitro, successfully implanted into patients, and made sure they function properly.