Researchers hope to create artificial lung to buy time for implant patients

"NIH-funded researchers are working to develop wearable “respiratory assist devices” that could do the lungs’ two jobs — supplying oxygen and getting rid of carbon dioxide — without tethering patients to a bulky bedside machine. It has been challenging.

“The lung is an amazing organ for gas exchange. It’s not so easy to develop a mechanical device that can essentially replace the function of a lung,” said bioengineer William Federspiel of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who helped invent a bedside device called the Hemolung and is working on next-step devices.

Donated lungs are in such short supply that only 1,923 transplants were performed last year, just 80 of them repeats, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing."

Full article at the Richmond Times Dispatch