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Medicine Technology

New Type Of Artificial Lung Created 103

Posted by samzenpus from the breath-differently dept.
cylonlover writes "Researchers have created an artificial lung that uses air as a ventilating gas instead of pure oxygen — as is the case with current man-made lungs, which require heavy tanks of oxygen that limit their portability. The prototype device was built following the natural lung's design and tiny dimensions and the researchers say it has reached efficiencies akin to the genuine organ. With a volume roughly the same as a human lung, the device could be implanted into a person and even be driven by the heart."
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New Type Of Artificial Lung Created More

New Type Of Artificial Lung Created

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  • Great news! (Score:5, Funny)

    by MrEricSir ( 398214 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @04:42PM (#36901630) Homepage

    Let's all celebrate... with a cigar!

  • So... (Score:2)

    by wsxyz ( 543068 )
    Does that mean it's ok to keep smoking now?

    • Does that mean it's ok to keep smoking now?

      Yeah - less flammable!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tsotha ( 720379 )
      Sure, as soon as they come out with artificial versions of lips, throat, esophagus, stomach, intestines, and colon. Oh, and arteries.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ManTaboo ( 2027174 )
      What it means is a person with cystic fibrosis(and other diseases as well of course), such as my daughter who may have to have a lung transplant in the future, has fighting chance to continue to live a somewhat normal life with continued technological/scientific progress in this field. This makes me happy!

      • Yeah I had the same thought when my Dad had a heart attack. Artificial hearts have been around for a while, why can't we buy one for him? I think there is a problem going from research to implementation. Scientists like developing things but they don't encourage mass production. There should be factories in Korea churning out hearts and lungs. With engineers (rather than scientists) in the loop they would get better very fast.

        Good luck for your daughter.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gknoy ( 899301 )

          While I'm not keen on being a first or second generation adopter, I suppose that for some it's a matter of living and not, and thus an easier choice.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      Lung cancer is actually one of the least of your worries if you smoke. There are so many other diseases (especially coronary artery disease) and exotic cancers caused by tobacco smoke that if you get lung cancer you might even consider yourself lucky.

      • Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @05:10PM (#36901874)

        Ummmmmm... I've seen people die from heart attack and people die from lung cancer.

        Bluntly? I'd take the heart attack. At least it's over quickly. You do NOT want to die from lung cancer. The execution equivalent would probably be crucifixion.

        • no way, crucified you'll die in less than a day of agonizing pain. Lung cancer and the other cancers it causes takes over a year in the many cases of friends and family I've lost to the (preventable, caused by stupidity) disease
        • You haven't seen enough people then, because it may not be so quick. Talk to someone with class IV heart failure from ischemic cardiomyopathy.

      • Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)

        by rubycodez ( 864176 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @05:34PM (#36902120)
        33% of smokers will die from smoking-caused disease, The breakdown is 40% cancer, 25% lung disease other than cancer, 35% heart disease. But of the other 66^ of smokers, they will also have health problems. But the lung cancer is the worst from what I've seen, a long drawn out agonizing death of over a year.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EdIII ( 1114411 )

          If you are talking about percentages, I heard something pretty staggering.

          Granted, it is second hand knowledge. A cardiologist told my friend that 99% of all the patients he did a heart bypass on smoked at some point in their lives. Obviously, sustained for a few years I would bet.

          Any cardiologists care to comment?

          • Your cardiologist is one of the 73.5 percent of people who "make up" 94.376 percent of statistics.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by EdIII ( 1114411 )

              That's really constructive.

              1) It is not my cardiologist.
              2) It is my friend's cardiologist.
              3) My friend was told this about 10 years ago.
              4) The cardiologist in question was highly respected and is in his 70's now and retired.

              So, snarky comments aside, I was seeking another cardiologist that may be on Slashdot to confirm, refute, or refine that statement. When my friend was told this, this cardiologist had probably performed thousands of bypasses. Sample size may be small, but I have no reason to disbelieve

              • Well if you have no reason to disbelieve the guy, why'd you ask then? 99 percent is your truth. He's your citation.

                And we can debate the constructiveness of fake statistics. I just really am skeptical of that number.

                I personally know 6 people that have had bypasses. Not one has been a smoker.

                I know many smokers.

                Is my experience so far outside the realm of the truth that 99 percent bypass patients being smokers that it is invalid? I don't have as many examples, for sure. But it is interesting that I g

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by EdIII ( 1114411 )

                  See that is constructive :)

                  I just don't like people bandying about statistics that probably aren't accurate.

                  You noticed I specifically said it was 2nd hand knowledge right? Then asked for opinions from other cardiologists?

                  I never claimed it was accurate, just an interesting percentage that people could weigh in on. To have a discussion about. Your last post was interesting. 100% of the bypass patients I know of are smokers, yet you are the opposite.

                  I never claimed it as truth, but in the absence of all other data, I have no reason to disbelieve his 99% or question his motives, espec

          • And what's the percentage of those patients ate junk food at some point in their live? How many practiced a sport at some point in their live?

            And here it comes: Correlation is not causation :)

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by EdIII ( 1114411 )

              lol

              I agree with you. However, you notice I put it out there as 2nd hand information I received from a well respected cardiologist, then made specific disclaimers, and asked for a discussion where others (possibly cardiologists) added their own experience or an actual number backed by a study.

              All I know is that this doctor said 99% of all his surgical patients smoked. That's it. You may be right that there were many other factors, and that smokers may also be predisposed towards other unhealthy behaviors

      • Don't be a turd, Dunbal.

        Lucky if you get lung cancer? Pah. I quit smoking over 35 years ago - and it still amazes me the vitriol that some people heap on smokers.

        I'd rather live with a smoker (and I think smoking is incredibly stupid) than deal with a sanctimonious jerk that insinuates that getting lung cancer is a good thing. It isn't.

    • Yes. But you really do want to get some help if you actually catch fire...

  • air exchange? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rbrausse ( 1319883 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @04:52PM (#36901738)

    TFA/TFS says that the blood stream through the lung is driven by the normal blood circulation - so far so good.

    but what about air exchange? the thing doesn't look flexible, so I think it is not possible to use the biological muscle-driven air stream. The information in the article are sparse, only "while air is fed into the gas inlet" mentions the topic of the air flow.

    this is only a first step, mechanical ventilation is still needed (and with the need of external devices this implanted lung is imo not useful, not only maintenance is harder but the patient has additionaly the danger of complications without the result of an apparatus-free life)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jgunchy ( 602271 )
      Oh, I don't know, Vader lasted pretty long with an external feed...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

      It does not need to be flexible. It could be a rigid wall on the back of a balloon, or two of these plates could be mounted between some elastic material. That would allow the use of a muscle driven air stream.

    • air pumps are no-where near as difficult to deal with as oxygen tanks when lugging them around/replacing them. I agree that there is still work to be done, but this is a HUGE step. Obviously the ultimate goal would be an entirely self-sufficient internal apparatus, but I would disagree that this isn't useful.
    • "mechanical ventilation is still needed"

      Sure, but it's a hell of a lot easier to create a small pump that uses ambient air (filtered no doubt) than it is to cram enough useful O2 into something that's not a pain in the ass to lug around. Even a backpack size pump has to be better than running around with O2 cylinders (and spares). Definitely a step in the right direction. cool.

  • Whole body prosthesis, sign me up!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tsotha ( 720379 )
      Tyler: [while creating RoboCop] We were able to save the left arm.
      Bob Morton: What? I thought we agreed on total body prosthesis, now lose the arm okay!
      Tyler: Jesus, Morton!
      [snaps his finger at RoboCop]
      Bob Morton: Can he understand what I'm saying?
      Roosevelt: Doesn't matter, we're gonna blank his memory anyway.
      Bob Morton: I think we should lose the arm, what do you think Johnson?
      Johnson: Well he signed a release form when he joined the force. He's legally dead. We can do pretty much what we want to h
    • I was thinking battle suits. I wonder if a special forces troop could benefit from having a couple extra lungs grafted in? With this form factor, it might actually be feasible (and removable). Better throw in an extra heart too, just to seal the deal.
    • naw, there's one part I'm keeping until they can get artificial nerves and feeling into it.....but after that, make it a ten inch x two inch o.d. when fully, er, deployed

  • Underwater breathing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dthief ( 1700318 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @05:06PM (#36901846)
    interesting post on the actual website that I thought I would re-post - can you create a similar technology that mimics a gill and would allow either underwater, or both under and above water breathing. though the air/liquid exchange is still an important issue for both. might require carrying a battery powered pump
    • Two issues:

      1) Moving water takes more muscle power than moving air
      2) Mammals (such as us) are warm blooded so our oxygen requirements are high. Fish and other gilled creatures are cold blooded and thus can actually survive on the amount of oxygen dissolved in water. We cannot.

      • @2: But Star Wars Episode I used a device that looked like it was extracting oxygen from the water to let the Jedi breathe. Are you saying that wasn't factually accurate?

        • Re:Underwater breathing (Score:5, Informative)

          by pluther ( 647209 ) <pluther@NoSPam.usa.net> on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @05:50PM (#36902234) Homepage
          It was totally factually accurate, but it didn't use dissolved oxygen like fish do, it actually split the water molecules on the fly to create enough oxygen to breathe.

          Interesting fact: More Jedi are injured due to oxygen toxicity from breathing pure oxygen at depth than by any other training accidents, including lightsaber fumbling.

          • Interesting fact: More Jedi are injured due to oxygen toxicity from breathing pure oxygen at depth than by any other training accidents, including lightsaber fumbling.

            Wow, I had no idea! Now I see why they were so speedy about getting Luke his prosthetic hand--the Jedi had a lot of experience replacing body parts.

        • That was just really tiny scuba gear with air compressed to absurd pressures.

        • Obviously the answer is that Jedi are cold blooded...

    • I don't really think so. I'm no biologist, but considering the much higher viscosity of water compared to air means that you would need a LOT more pressure to move the same volume of material. IIRC fishes (and other animals using gills) also don't breathe "in and out" but rather have some sort of "pass through" breathing apparatus, possibly owing it to the high viscosity and the rather poor efficiency. There's rather little oxygen in water compared to air.

      So... no. But maybe we can use other liquids. Liquid [wikipedia.org]

      • Quick calculations:

        The body consumes 5-6 mL of oxygen at what I assume is close to STP (1), which comes out 7.14 mg of oxygen. The numbers here (2) indicate the dissolved oxygen content can be fairly high, e.g., "the optimal DO for adult brown trout is 9-12 mg/l." In as much as I assume this would be applied toward diving, dissolved oxygen tends to increase with depth. It does not seem that unreasonable to be able to process a liter of water or less per minute, if not by this mechanism, then by some othe

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Plunky ( 929104 )

          Quick calculations:

          I think the problem with your calculations is that you assume we would be able to extract *all* the available oxygen from that litre, you should be looking at the DO of the discarded water to see how efficient the process is going to be..

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, some kind of Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus would be really cool!

    • Extracting the oxygen from water isn't the problem. Concentrating it is.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dthief ( 1700318 )
        so how are fish alive? ...are they all....(cue music).....zombies!!!!

        if you can mimic a human lung with a grid of micro-channels, why cant you mimic the design of a fishes gills and breathing apparatuses?

        • Re:Underwater breathing (Score:4, Interesting)

          by demonlapin ( 527802 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @07:34PM (#36902978) Homepage Journal
          Your lungs are able to extract oxygen from air because there is more oxygen in the air than in the blood. Your blood carries this oxygen to the tissue, where the blood has more oxygen than the tissue - the oxygen then diffuses into the tissue.

          In theory, you could do this with an adequate flow of surface seawater (which has a partial pressure of O2 very similar to that of air), but the fact that the oxygen content of seawater is minuscule compared to the oxygen content of air means that you're going to need an enormous water flow. You should be able to extract about a fourth of the oxygen in the seawater before the partial pressure will go low enough that no further net diffusion of oxygen will occur (human not under load typically extract about a fifth, but let's be conservative here). Given that the oxygen content of fresh water is about 0.0089 g/L H2O [engineeringtoolbox.com], that's about 12.5 mL O2 per liter of water. Humans need about 250 mL O2 per minute at rest, so you'll need to extract all the oxygen from 20 L/min of fresh water saturated with air in order to supply each person. However, they're going to need at least four times that flow due to the difficulty of extraction, so now we're up to 80 L/min of water flow at rest, even if you don't consider the efficiency of the exchange process.

          The way around this is to do something that captures more of the oxygen content of the water - usually by binding it to some intermediate (as we, and fish, do - hemoglobin is one such). The problem is that the human heart can't handle that level of cardiac output for it to happen within an all-blood system, and that any molecule which can extract a large measure of the oxygen available in water isn't going to give it up easily - it will have an oxygen dissociation curve that lets go a significant amount of the oxygen only at very low tissue pO2. Unfortunately for us, "tissue" in this case is the breathing-air side of the artificial lung. So you can choose chemical sequestration, but that presents the same problem - unless you can figure out some way for humans to live with much lower tissue pO2, you're going to have to expend a lot of energy dissociating that oxygen from whatever carrier you use to get it up to a usable concentration for humans. Fish have much lower metabolic oxygen requirements and so can live with lower tissue pO2.
    • Hope they can invent this underwater breathing thing in a hurry. That talking head in some TV was yapping away saying the USA is going to be underwater on Aug 2. Something about some ceiling.
  • ... organic organs heal if they should happen to get damaged (as long as the damage is below a certain severity threshold). So until they can figure out how to make them self-repairing as well, it seems to me that there's still a long way to go.

    • Well, since technology is repeatable once built, I think it's easier and more efficient to just replace it when it breaks down. At least it's a very good replacement 'til we get the technology for self-healing artificial lungs, but I'd rather have them concentrate on other body parts before trying that, it's good enough for now 'til we have no other worries.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        Having to wait several months (or years) for a surgery appointment to have your chest opened up by a surgeon to replace a synthetic organ that has gotten damaged is more efficient than something that can repair itself in just a fraction of that time?

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @05:17PM (#36901980)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • We have the technology, we can rebuild him.... sort of.

  • I've been waiting for this for years, I always knew we'd get there eventually. I'm going to go buy a carton of Marlboros to celebrate.

  • Does this mean that I can start smoking?

  • "You owe it to yourself. You owe it to your family."

  • Great news for all those with lung cancer, they can get replacement parts now, and keep smoking as much as they want....!

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