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 called “organoids”

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 an “in vitro” environment, or they could implant it into

a host organism’s tissue, an “in vivo” environment.

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, we’re 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.