Two research teams at New England have built living, breathing lung tissue in which would open up doors to new drugs and a step closer to develop replacement lungs for patients.

In their research, Harvard scientist, re-created an area of lung on a ‘silicon rubber chip’ and found that it responded to bacteria just like a living lung. Also, Yale’s research team, using the same approach, successfully regenerated lungs and transplanted them into rats in which they functioned just like a living lung for almost two hours.

This new achievement allows the pharmaceutical companies to test their new drugs on these rubber chips that closely resemble the complexity of a normal human lung. This could also provide a substitute for animal testing in laboratories. “The long-term goal is developing a platform for lung replacement,’’ said Dr. Laura Niklason, a professor of anesthesiology and biomedical engineering at Yale.

Such research could eventually provide tools to test drugs and grow new tissue to repair damaged organs.