A team led by Prof. Dr. Bettina Wiegmann, an emergency medicine specialist and consultant in cardiac surgery at the Clinical Department of Cardiothoracic, Transplant and Vascular Surgery at Hannover Medical School (MHH), has been researching this since 2017 as part of the priority program Towards an implantable Lung of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Together with her research group at the Lower Saxony Centre for Biomedical Engineering, Implant Research and Development (NIFE), she is developing what is known as the biohybrid lung. This is based on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). In this lung support system, which is already in clinical use, blood is passed through plastic hollow-fiber membranes (HFM), which facilitate gas exchange.