Bio-inspired, efficient, artificial lung employing air as the ventilating gas.

Artificial lungs have recently been utilized to rehabilitate patients suffering from lung diseases. However, significant advances in gas exchange, biocompatibility, and portability are required to realize their full clinical potential. Here, we have focused on the issues of gas exchange and portability and report a small-scale, microfabricated artificial lung that uses new mathematical modeling and a bio-inspired design to achieve oxygen exchange efficiencies much larger than current devices, thereby enabling air to be utilized as the ventilating gas. This advancement eliminates the need for pure oxygen required by conventional artificial lung systems and is achieved through a device with feature sizes and structure similar to that in the natural lung. This advancement represents a significant step towards creating the first truly portable and implantable artificial lung systems for the ambulatory care of patients suffering from lung diseases.

[1]  J. Berg,et al.  Studies on surface wettability of poly(dimethyl) siloxane (PDMS) and glass under oxygen-plasma treatment and correlation with bond strength , 2005, Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems.

[2]  Erik K. Bassett,et al.  Lung assist device technology with physiologic blood flow developed on a tissue engineered scaffold platform. , 2011, Lab on a chip.

[3]  J K. Lee,et al.  Microchannel Technologies for Artificial Lungs: (1) Theory , 2008, ASAIO journal.

[4]  Robert W Barber,et al.  Biomimetic design of microfluidic manifolds based on a generalised Murray's law. , 2006, Lab on a chip.

[5]  H H. Kung,et al.  Microchannel Technologies for Artificial Lungs: (3) Open Rectangular Channels , 2008, ASAIO journal.

[6]  Michael John Smith,et al.  The impact of the lung allocation score on short-term transplantation outcomes: a multicenter study. , 2008, The Journal of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery.

[7]  A. Hill,et al.  The possible effects of the aggregation of the molecules of haemoglobin on its dissociation curves , 1910 .

[8]  William R Wagner,et al.  Towards microfabricated biohybrid artificial lung modules for chronic respiratory support , 2009, Biomedical microdevices.

[9]  David R. Emerson,et al.  Optimal design of microfluidic networks using biologically inspired principles , 2008 .

[10]  C. Schmid,et al.  Pumpless extracorporeal lung assist: a 10-year institutional experience. , 2008, The Annals of thoracic surgery.

[11]  Jeffrey T Borenstein,et al.  Branched vascular network architecture: a new approach to lung assist device technology. , 2010, The Journal of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery.

[12]  Diana Elbourne,et al.  Efficacy and economic assessment of conventional ventilatory support versus extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for severe adult respiratory failure (CESAR): a multicentre randomised controlled trial , 2009, The Lancet.

[13]  Jens Gottlieb,et al.  Bridge to lung transplantation with the novel pumpless interventional lung assist device NovaLung. , 2006, The Journal of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery.

[14]  G. Whitesides,et al.  Rapid Prototyping of Microfluidic Systems in Poly(dimethylsiloxane). , 1998, Analytical chemistry.

[15]  W. Federspiel,et al.  A Mathematical Model of Gas Exchange in an Intravenous Membrane Oxygenator , 2004, Annals of Biomedical Engineering.

[16]  H. Takiwaki,et al.  Derivation of theoretical equations of the CO2 dissociation curve and the carbamate fraction in the Haldane effect. , 1983, The Japanese journal of physiology.