Microchip manufacturing process leads to better artificial lung

MIT Technology Review : Assisting damaged lungs to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide through the use of mechanical ventilation is an invasive procedure that can prevent healing and cause major complications. When that isn’t an option, a treatment called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is used in which the patient’s blood is drawn and run through a machine before being returned to the patient’s body. Unfortunately, because blood is sensitive to environment, it tends to clot easily in the machine. As a result, the patient must be put on dangerous amounts of blood-thinning medication. Now, an alternative ECMO machine has been developed that uses microchip manufacturing techniques to create an environment much more similar to that of the lungs. David O’Dowd of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues have created a three-dimensional structure by layering biocompatible plastic in which larger channels break into smaller ones, similar to how blood vessels branch into capillaries. The resulting structure significantly reduces the amount of clotting and has achieved a flow rate of 100 ml/minute in tests with bovine blood. The next step is to scale it up so that it can handle a higher rate of flow. If successful, it could provide a much safer and less complicated alternative to current ECMO machines.