Everything becomes a bit more serious when disease hits your lungs. We take it for granted, the smoothness of the entire pulmonary operation, its rigorous standards for healthy operation and ability to maintain that every second of every day in the face of exhaust clouds, cigarette smoke, everyday radioactive gas (having nothing to do with a certain nuclear power plant), and liters of snot just waiting to host some very real-ass infection. Basically, if your lungs were your colon you would never be able to leave the toilet. Yet they carry on—until they don’t, and suddenly everything is very bad: emphysema, lung cancer, cystic fibrosis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, a sort of catch-all for a variety of different things that have the effect of slowly removing your ability to breathe.You get along like this, not suffering on the metaphorical pulmonary toilet for your lung health sins, because lung tissue is, well, amazing. In a sense, it’s among the most full developed all of your body’s cells. This makes it extraordinarily different to make new lung cells in a laboratory and, while scientists have successfully grown heart cells, pancreatic beta cells, intestinal cells, liver cells, and nerve cells, lung cells have remained a more distant goal. Last weekend, however, a team from Columbia University published a paper in Nature Biotechnology claiming the first successful growth of lung cells from human embryonic stem cells, and also a patent on the technology.You care about this more than you think. Biotechnology is, at this very moment, extending your lifetime far more than Ray Kurzweil is. Much of that has to do with stem cells and the ability to create new differentiated tissue of different sorts from just one kind of cell. The stem cell promise. This tissue is, crucially, material belonging to the patient in a genetic sense rather than tissue donated from another patient. That means less danger of that tissue being rejected by the body, a system that happens to be very good at kicking out anything it might perceive as foreign, like a donated lung used in a transplant.The process is much closer to “biohacking” than most anything bearing the name. The paper’s lead author, Hans-Willem Snoeck, explained the how it works in an interview last week. “[Step one]: reprogram adult cells (skin, blood …) to pluripotent stem cells similar to embryonic stem cells (such cells are called induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells; last year's Nobel Prize was awarded for this). Two: differentiate (convert) these to lung cells. This what our paper accomplished. Three: seed these onto donor lungs (or perhaps even pig lungs could be used) from which all donor cells have been removed.”So, there are effectively two “hacking” steps. The first reprograms a specific kind of cell (again, like a skin cell) into a generic stem cell, and the second programs that stem cell into a lung cell. Finally, you grow a bunch of new healthy lung cells onto a pig lung or donated human lung, which provides a kind of framework for the new tissue. Snoeck notes that none of this is as easy as it might sound.Ideally, the process above can be used minus the donor lungs or pig lungs, delivering tissue that’s transplant ready. “This is something we are pursuing,” Snoeck noted. “The challenge here is this: we have to find a way to have our cells engraft in an injured lung without killing the patient. I say without killing the patient because we first have to remove at least some of the patient's own, sick cells. That is not trivial. Furthermore, an adult lung has its own, lung-specific stem cells that repair the lung after damage (flu would 100 percent lethal if we did not have these cells). We are trying to generate these lung stem cells from iPS cells, and hope that we will find a way to engraft these.” Working against the body to save the body.@everydayelk
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