Meet Dr. Darcy Wagner, an MUHC bioengineer with big dreams for respiratory care

Lung disease represents a major global health crisis, ranking as a leading cause of disability and death worldwide. In Canada, more than 3 million Canadians suffer from serious lung diseases—chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pulmonary fibrosis—with very little recourse. But at the Meakins-Christie Laboratories of the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC), expert researchers like Dr. Darcy Wagner are doing everything they can to improve lung health in Montreal and around the world.

As part of the Montreal Chest Institute (MCI), the Meakins-Christie Laboratories are at the forefront of providing breathtaking research and breath-giving care. Every year, the MCI treats over 30,000 patients for respiratory diseases, providing personalized care and helping patients living with lung disease breathe easier and live longer. Supported by the MUHC Foundation, the MUHC recruited Dr. Darcy Wagner, a renowned all-star bioengineer with big dreams for respiratory care; her arrival is a game changer for what is possible for the MCI and for Montreal.

Dr. Wagner is a rare kind of problem solver. She is renowned for her out-of-the-box ideas and for being uncompromising in her pursuit of ground-breaking treatments for severe lung disease like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). For COPD, there is often only one truly effective option for treatment – a lung transplant. Unfortunately, hospitals face a shortage of lungs and donors. On top of this, a lung transplant is a very invasive surgery that poses significant risk for life-threatening complications.

Like something out of science fiction, Dr. Wagner wants to build new lungs outside of the body that can then be transplanted into patients. To do this, she is working with sophisticated 3D bioprinters to reconstruct parts of a lung, such as an airway, or an entire lung, from scratch.

For Dr. Wagner, her mission to find an alternative to a transplant is personal. At only 16, she experienced the devastating loss of her best friend—he passed away while waiting for a kidney transplant. Dr. Wagner wants to prevent families and loved ones from undergoing a similar loss for what she believes can be preventable.

With degrees in engineering and biology, Dr. Wagner is uniquely equipped to explore the possibilities of lung regeneration treatment. At the heart of her research are stem cells that can help regenerate tissue in the lungs—but these do not last long outside of the body. This is a major barrier towards using them to heal organs, but Dr. Wagner has a solution.

By using revolutionary new techniques in bioprinting to help stem cells last longer, Dr. Wagner is figuring out how to create healthy new lung tissue that can be transplanted into patients. This involves using a special scaffold material to cover and support the stem cells, which ensures that they will survive. If this can be applied to patients, physicians would collect their stem cells or those from a donor and use them to kickstart the healing process or transplant healthy new tissue to replace the damaged lungs.

“When you’re engineering things, you can completely reimagine the type of therapy that you might give these patients, and that’s very exciting,” shares Dr. Wagner.

Physicians could also test new therapies by building realistic lung models in the lab using the cells from individual patients—this is truly transformational precision medicine.