Replacement body part: A diagram of the upper respiratory tract, showing the trachea or windpipe that was rebuilt with a patient's own stem cells.
Credit: Wikimedia/Arcadia
PARIS: The pioneering transplant of a windpipe stripped of its cells and seeded with recipient stem cells has given a 30-year old Colombian woman a new lease on life.
The operation is the first of its kind, and shows that adult stem cells combined with re-engineered biological materials can "radically improve the ability of surgeons to treat patients with serious diseases," said Martin Birchall, a professor at the University of Bristol in Britain, and one of the study's authors.
"Verge of a new age"
"We believe this success has proved that we are on the verge of a new age in surgical care," he said. The study is published today in medical journal The Lancet.
The loss of a normal airway is devastating, and attempts to replace them have met with serious problems such as rejection by the immune system, the uncontrolled die-off of cells, called necrosis, and lethal bleeding.
Claudia Castillo, stricken with tuberculosis, was facing the loss of her left lung after the tube-like branch connecting it to the trachea, or windpipe, became infected and collapsed beyond repair. Doctors explained that they could try an untested method to replace the ruined airway.
"I was scared at the beginning because I was the first patient, but had confidence and trusted my doctors," Castillo said in a press release. "The possibility of avoiding the removal of my entire lung – and instead replacing only my diseased bronchus – represented a unique chance for me to return to a normal life."
High-tech detergent
With her green light, a team of scientists and surgeons from Spain, Italy and Britain each contributed specialised knowledge to the task.
Using a new technique developed at the University of Padua, scientists removed all the cells from the trachea of a dead 51-year old donor by scrubbing it clean with a high-tech detergent and enzyme solution. This left a 'biological scaffold' of connective tissue.
The next steps were to reconstitute the living tissue using Castillo's own stem cells, and graft them onto the scaffolding.
Stem cells were obtained from her bone marrow, and cultivated in large numbers in Birchall's laboratory in Britain. They were then coaxed – using growth-stimulating proteins – into becoming structure-giving cartilage cells using a method originally devised for treating osteoarthritis.
