Maintain pressure on reforms to protect NHSStem cells give new windpipe to boy
A boy has had his windpipe rebuilt by doctors using his stem cells, in what is being hailed as path-breaking surgery.
If the 10-year-old’s recovery is a success, surgeons say the method they used at London’s Great Ormond Street children’s hospital on Monday may start a regenerative medicine revolution.
Surgeons injected cells from the boy’s bone marrow into his windpipe (the fibrous collagen “scaffold” of a donor trachea), which was then implanted in the patient. The stem cells are expected to begin to transform themselves over the next month into both internal and external tracheal cells.
The patient, who has not been named, is breathing normally and his recovery is reported to be on course. The operation took nine hours to carry out.
The cells will not trigger an immune response as they come from his own tissue. Normally after a transplant a child’s immune system would need to be medically suppressed because of the natural process of organ rejection.
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Readers' comments (2)
susan mcconnell | 22-Mar-2010 5:20 pm
It would have been interesting to know why this procedure was performed on this particular patient i.e. what types of medical condition can be resolved with this procedure? Is it only suitable for trauma cases or could it be utilised for cancer patients for example.
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Anonymous | 24-Mar-2010 1:43 pm
This is very interesting procedure, what is the criteria for this procedure and expensive?
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