Research may help premature babies breathe

EDMONTON, Alberta, Nov 8, 2005 (UPI via COMTEX) -- University of Alberta researchers say they have pioneered gene therapy to restore alveoli and lung capillaries in damaged rat lungs.

The research is described as a first step toward helping premature babies, who are often at risk of developing bronchopulmonary dysplasia -- a chronic lung disease caused by having to place such infants on ventilators and oxygen-rich therapy for acute respiratory failure.

With many such premature babies approaching their adolescent years, clinicians and researchers are also waiting to see whether longer term health problems are going to begin occurring.

"Right now we simply don't have any treatments," says Bernard Thebaud, a clinician-scientist and neonatologist in the university's Department of Pediatrics. "So, if we can't prevent it, we've started to think about how we might repair it."

Using animal models, Thebaud and colleagues have, in effect, grown new blood vessels and alveoli -- the tiny air sacs in which exchange occurs between the lungs and blood vessels.

The results of the researchers' work were recently published in the journal Circulation.

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