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Comment by point78 | Hacker News Reader

The difference here is before the donor had to be a near perfect fit. With this method they can build the scaffolding from any dead body then use recipients cells for the tissue.

So we go from a couple thousand lung transplants a year with 50% mortality to potentially unlimited and much lower mortality (don't really know the mortality rate here but so far looks promising and better than).

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Along with that, the fact that the scaffolding isn't living cells means that they can likely preserve the lungs for longer periods of time for future recipients too. That should be a massive boon for transplants since they'll no longer need to be a "Get here in 30 minutes or the organ won't be viable long enough" kind of situation.

Additionally the donor doesn't necessarily have to be human.

If pig lungs are a good enough a fit.

Pig lungs are extemely close to human lungs --- that's why a lot of such research is done on them.

Looks like the age of chimeras is upon us.

It's already here to an extent. Pig heart valves have already been transplanted into humans.

Would pig lungs offer an advantage somehow in terms of performance?

I was thinking in terms of availability.

There are more pigs in Australia than people, comprised of about 24 million feral pigs and about 4.5 million pigs produced each year for consumption.

Australia's population is currently about 25 million.

The number of normal pigs available isn't really significant... Even if you assume that the donor pigs wouldn't be heavily genetically engineered (and they probably would be), the risk of xenogeneic infection (ie pig viruses being carried over to the patient) means that they'd have to be raised under sterile conditions, so normal pigs are useless. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC88959/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11041495

Thanks for the reply.

Fair points.

We’re not talking about xenotransplantation of living tissues though.

Still, there would probably be a non-zero chance of xenoinfection from non-human non-cellular scaffold use in bioengineered organs.

You’re probably right that if this were to become a use case for non-human parts the source probably wouldn’t be regular far animals.

We’re not talking about xenotransplantation of living tissues though. I appreciate that. I did have the idea that the stringency of the washes in decellularization wouldn't be enough to get rid of viruses. Looked into it and it turns out that might not be true. Washing might be enough: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12115437

Not sure how compatible this is w/ the protocol used in the OP.

That didn't even occur to me. If they were compatible for this in humans, then a huge amount of the meat industry could benefit by providing the lungs that they can't always easily sell (organ meat isn't as popular for humans at least).

it's also a boon towards eventually 3d printing the scaffolding instead of using a pregrown one

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