It has previously been demonstrated in mice.
The line of thinking is: “sometimes when a sever trauma victim comes into the hospital, their mouth/throat/chest are damaged so much that they can’t breathe, or they won’t be able to breathe properly during surgery to repair the damage. How can we keep them from dying before we finish surgery?”
One way is to externally oxygenate their blood with a heart/lung machine. But another is to look for other tissue in the body which could be oxygen permeable and provide contact with blood. Intestines already allow absorption of other nutrients, so it seems like a reasonable choice to research.
Also, apparently some fish do this normally.
