Yes, it’s true. If you were following on Twitter, you would have seen the tweets about Martha Stewart at the TEDMED conference touching a pair of breathing pig lungs on stage. The setup was a miraculous opening aria by opera singer Charity Tilleman-Dick, who then revealed the real miracle: a year ago she had a double-lung transplant. Shaf Keshavjee followed, wheeling out his ex vivo lung machine, which can maintain a healthy lung out of the body for 24 hours, enabling doctors to treat the lung with medications and even gene therapy before transplanting it to enhance the chances of success. Keshavjee invited audience members to come and touch the lungs, which is how Martha ended up there, iPhone in hand, preparing to tweet about her experience. Full story »
Posts tagged as:
lung
Babies whose urinary tracts are obstructed before birth are at risk for a life-threatening complication: being born with poorly developed lungs. But surgeon Grace Nicksa, MD believes lung development could be preserved if the mother’s womb were infused with enough fluid at the right time in her pregnancy. Full story »
Combining microfabrication techniques from the computer industry with modern tissue engineering, a team at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has created a device that mimics the function of a human lung. This living “lung-on-a-chip,” which incorporates human lung and blood-vessel cells, reproduces the all-important interface between the lung’s tiny air sacs and the bloodstream. Breathing is simulated with a vacuum pump.
The wafer-sized device mimics the human lung’s response to infectious agents, airborne particles and toxins in a way that’s truer to real life than standard cell testing in a lab dish. Full story »
