Supermassive Black Hole A Star

Author notes

Ep. 34, Page 35

smbhax

on Aug. 7, 2018

A recent BBC article describes how scientists have for the first time successfully transplanted an engineered lung into a pig.

"A cocktail of sugar and detergent" was used to strip the cells and blood vessels from a donor lung; the remaining "scaffolding" was then hung in a "bioreactor" (appropriately mad-scientist-looking photo included in the article) where, given infusions of stem cells from the intended recipient, and "growth factors" (vitamins and hormones, apparently), it regenerated over the course of 30 days into an essentially new, functioning lung, one that would not be rejected by the recipient's body because it grew from their own cells.