Synthetic Windpipe Successfully Transplanted in American Man

[alp227]

Surgeons in Sweden have replaced the cancerous windpipe of a Maryland man with one fabricated in a laboratory and seeded with his own cells.

The windpipe, or trachea, made from minuscule plastic fibers and covered in stem cells taken from the man’s bone marrow, was transplanted successfully in November. The patient, Christopher Lyles, 30, who had a type of tracheal cancer that is normally considered inoperable, arrived back home in Baltimore on Wednesday. It was the second procedure of its kind and the first in an American.

“He went home in very good shape,” said Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, director of the Advanced Center for Translational Regenerative Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Dr. Macchiarini is a leader in the field of tissue engineering, in which the goal is to produce replacement tissues and organs outside the body. Research in the field has undergone a resurgence in recent years because of advances in the study of stem cells, undifferentiated cells that can proliferate and be induced to become cells of a specific type of tissue.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/health/research/surgeons-transplant-synthetic-trachea-in-baltimore-man.html

[Lint Head]

1. Wow! This is fantastic. Walt Disney would have been saved if this were in place

back in the 60's and I know plenty of others who could have been helped.