LUNGS FROM SCRATCH
Millions of people suffer from organ failure; 15 million people need lung transplants alone. But the organ transplant system currently has nowhere near the number of organs needed to help patients suffering from organ failure. Particularly when it comes to lungs, the current available treatments are not enough to help people breathe easily. Erica Comber, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), is part of Carnegie Mellon’s Bioengineered Organs Initiative. And the great thing about the Initiative, according to Comber, is that its researchers are all working toward the goal of handling, and eliminating,
within the chest and designed in geometries that optimize
the organ deficit. And sometimes this means not only
how much oxygen and carbon dioxide can be cycled in and
obtaining organs for patients—but making them.
out of the circulatory system.
There are many ways to make a lung, however, and with so many possible approaches, where do you even start? That’s exactly the question that Comber and her advisor
Existing artificial lungs are largely stopgap measures, and a plethora of complications can arise from their use. The average duration of use is about a week, and a patient’s
Keith Cook, professor of biomedical engineering, addressed
chance of surviving the therapy shrinks the longer they’ve
in a recent, first-of-its-kind paper, outlining several different
been supported. Artificial lungs made from polymers can
approaches to creating human lungs from scratch.
also cause blood to form clots on the surface, which is why
“There’s a huge divergence of approaches in this
they fail, and have to be frequently replaced. Drugs used to
field, and no one approach is necessarily more valid
slow blood clots can also cause patients to bleed. Each time
than another,” says Comber. “It’s about using different
artificial lungs are replaced, the patient can be exposed to
techniques to try to accomplish the same goal and then
infection risk.
learning from each other.”
De novo lung biofabrication could be the key to solving
By identifying important parameters to consider and
these issues. By designing artificial lungs that can be
describing the ways that one could approach this problem,
permanently attached to the circulatory system, and
the paper, published in Translational Research, will act as a
that can be created in geometries that approximate lung
guide to future researchers looking to create human organs
geometries but optimize for gas exchange, researchers
de novo, or “from scratch.”
could remedy the blood clotting and bleeding risk
The paper discusses a few different approaches to addressing the problem of de novo organ creation.
associated with existing artificial lungs. “We have a long way to go,” says Comber, “but we expect
Approaches span from using existing biological organs as
to see these de novo organs commercially available in our
a starting point—by removing cells from existing organs
lifetime.”
and recellularizing them with the patient’s own cells—to generating completely artificial organs. Comber’s work is a hybrid of those two approaches. This
Comber is co-advised by Cook and Adam Feinberg, professor of biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering. Co-authors on this paper include Cook,
paper outlines approaches to her work, which is to create de
and BME faculty Xi Ren and Rachelle Palchesko Simko, and
novo artificial lungs. Using natural materials such as collagen
BME postdoctoral researcher Wai Hoe Ng.
PA GE 4 3
type 1, Comber makes artificial lungs that can be housed
