Michael Le Page is a person.
The pigs recover from low blood oxygen levels.
Tyler Stableford is a photographer.
The injection of trillions of tiny oxygen bubbles into the rectum has been shown to raise blood oxygen levels and lower carbon dioxide levels in pigs. The researchers want to do safety tests on healthy volunteers.
The approach could help people who have low blood oxygen. Robert Scribner, a Colorado-based company set up to commercialise the approach, says that people with covid-19 often come into hospitals with very low oxygen levels.
He says that it could be a good therapy to raise the oxygen saturation in those patients, and that it might mean they don't need to be put on a ventilator.
The treatment should work over a longer period of time, says team member Keely Buesing at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
She says that there is no reason why oxygen microbubbles can't be cycled in and out of the body. The colonic delivery method could be a long-term sustaining therapy for severely injured patients, but we haven't tested it out to those time points.
The key to the approach is that the oxygen is enclosed in micrometre-sized bubbles of fat, says team member Mark Borden at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Compared with pure oxygen gas, the tiny bubbles increase the surface area and allow more oxygen to diffuse through the colon into the bloodstream.
Thin-air therapy has unexpected medical benefits.
Twelve pigs weighing between 40 and 50 kilograms were exposed to smoke for the pig tests. Their blood oxygen saturation dropped to 66 per cent after two days. After 150 minutes, the percentage was raised to 81 per cent. Oxygen saturation fell in the animals that weren't treated. The pigs were kept under anesthesia.
Blood carbon dioxide levels fell in the pigs that were treated, but they kept rising in the animals that weren't treated. This is important because high carbon dioxide can have adverse effects.
She says that your mental status declines to a point where you can no longer protect your airway.
The Tokyo Medical and Dental University carried out a study in pigs using a fluid called perfluorocarbon that can hold high levels of oxygen. The advantage of using oxygen microbubbles is that it should be easier to get regulatory approval than with perfluorocarbon, but further studies are needed to confirm how effective it is.
The perfluorocarbon approach is being developed by Takebe. The group has set up a company called EVA that is going to do a human trial in the year 2022.
Oxygen microbubbles will be more effective than perfluorocarbon according to the team. The film The Abyss portrayed perfluorocarbon as a breathing liquid that could hold a lot of oxygen, but it doesn't release all of it and might not remove carbon dioxide.
The reference is bioRxiv.
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