Biography:
Dr. Joan Nichols is still alive and well so there is very little written about her life before being a professor at the University of Texas. She is has 20 years experience in pathology in humans and experimental models in animals. At the University of Texas she is a professor in the Departments of Internal Medicine, Infectious Diseases, and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology.
Contributions:
Dr. Joan Nichols has led a team of researchers that has created a set of lungs. What makes this very difficult is that lungs have an internal cartilage skeleton. The way Nichols' team creates a set of new lungs is they start off with a set of donated, damaged lungs. They begin by removing the sick tissue from the cartilage skeleton. When all the tissue has been removed they are then able to build new tissues on the skeleton. This method takes a pair of unhealthy donated lungs and used the remaining skeleton to create a set of health lungs.
So What?
There are many patients on waiting lists for lung transplants, so when a set of lungs is donated they need to be used. There are many donations that take place but cannot be used because the lung tissue is damaged in some way. With Nichols' breakthrough there will be more lungs on the market. This means that the waitlist will decrease significantly and there will be less wasted donations.
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