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When it comes to organ transplants, Dr. Joaquin Cortiella knows the clock is always ticking.
“There are people dying every day because they don’t have an organ,” Cortiella said. “Those people are dying, those people are getting sicker, the lists are getting longer and the number of organs are fewer.”
For the past 15 years, Cortiella, a pediatric anesthesiologist, and Joan Nichols, PhD, associate director of the Galveston National Laboratory at UTMB, have worked together against the clock to fi nd a way to bioengineer lungs in the lab. Those lungs would be invaluable for testing and modeling, they said. They could also be used for lung transplants, which would be lifesaving for many, particularly children, Cortiella said. Diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, Cortiella knows he too could be on a transplant list someday.
But his interest in growing bioengineered lungs began long before he was diagnosed with cancer and lung disease. It was in the 1980s, during his pediatric training in Boston, that Cortiella saw many premature babies born without fully developed lungs. Many would die or, if they lived, would go on to endure pulmonary diseases.
“My interest was piqued because of that,” Cortiella said. “I wanted to learn more about how we can save these children.”
But his first attempt at making a bioengineered lung while still in Boston did not pan out. When Cortiella came to UTMB in 2001 to give a talk, a mutual friend arranged a meeting with Nichols. Over lunch, Cortiella and Nichols sketched out on a napkin how they could make their idea work.
Since then, the two have carried on a friendly banter, often disagreeing, but steadily making progress. A decade and a half later, that napkin still sits on Nichols’ desk in the GNL, and the lungs they engineered together have been transplanted successfully into two different pigs. Their work involves taking lungs that could not be used for transplant patients and removing the cells until only the proteins, or scaffold, are left. Then new cells are added to the scaffold, which grow until, eventually, you have a functioning lung.
While methodically making progress on their work, Cortiella would have to leave periodically when called up by the U.S. Army Reserve to serve in the medical corps. He signed up to serve in the late 1990s and is now a Colonel who received a Bronze Star for his service. “I believed it was my turn to give back to the country,” he said.
It was in 2010 when he was serving at a military hospital in Iraq that he started wheezing during a normal run.
A CT scan revealed a tumor in his chest. Upon his return to Texas, doctors found that he had thymoma, a rare tumor of the thymus. Treating the tumor led to Cortiella’s pulmonary fibrosis. Once a regular runner, Cortiella now has to have oxygen available at home. He knows he’ll need a lung transplant someday, but he hardly thinks about it. Rather, he said, he is even more convinced of the importance of the work he, Nichols and others are doing.
“It reminds me of how many people with lung disease are out there who are in worse shape than me—and how valuable this research is in helping those people.”