A bold, early-stage project aiming to develop lab-grown lungs-which could bring fresh hope to people with pulmonary diseases, such as asthma and lung cancer-has been awarded $1.5 million over three years from the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group. The effort will be led by researchers at Boston University's College of Engineering and School of Medicine.
Established by the late Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen, the Allen Distinguished Investigator program awards grants to support nontraditional, ambitious research in biology and medicine.
Despite the potential of therapies that switch diseased and dysfunctional tissue, such as lung tissue, with healthy, lab-grown replacements, researchers are held back by a lack of understanding of how the lung naturally develops its fractal structure, an intricate network of ever-smaller tubes. The goal of the BU project is to fill that knowledge gap, targeting the eventual regeneration of lung tissue.
"The lung's branching fractal structure is very energetically efficient for delivering oxygen," says Wilson W. Wong, a College of Engineering associate professor of biomedical engineering; he's working on the project with Darrell N. Kotton, a School of Medicine professor of medicine, and Christopher Chen, a College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering. "The question is, how do the cells decide to form tubes and then keep branching into tinier tubes?"
Applying different theories to that question, the BU team will attempt to engineer cells that automatically generate those fractal patterns and can help mimic the real organ.
"It's risky because we have to build a lot of things from scratch, but that's what we do in synthetic biology," says Wong, a pioneer in programming cellular circuits. "This is the famous physicist Richard Feynman's philosophy-we can't understand what we cannot build. Even if we fail, the project will add to our understanding of the lung."
It's that mix of ambition and potential impact that has earned the researchers the title of Allen Distinguished Investigators. Chen is the founding director of BU's Biological Design Center and Kotton is director of the BU Center for Regenerative Medicine.
If the team does succeed, their research will be a boon to regenerative medicine-and to people suffering from pulmonary diseases.
