Darcy Wagner is on a quest to improve research into the human lung – and to develop synthetic therapies for both acute and chronic lung disease.
“These are the third and fourth leading causes of death in the world – and have no cure,” says Wagner, associate professor in the department of experimental medical science at Lund University in Sweden.
Patients with chronic lung disease have one option: a lung transplant. However, survival times are short compared to, say, a heart transplant, and there is an acute shortage of lungs for transplantation. These factors inform Wagner’s work in developing ways to produce synthetic lung tissue using 3D printing.
Now, it is being intensively researched – by Wagner and many others – as a way of manipulating biological material. Shortages of donor organs, and the ever-present chance of tissue rejection, are some of the factors behind this intense focus, though researchers accept that they are only at the start of a very...