London - Doctors in Spain have carried out a pioneering
tissue-engineered whole organ transplant by using a windpipe created
with the patient's own stem cells, it was reported Wednesday.
Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old Colombian woman, underwent the
ground-breaking operation at a hospital in Barcelona in June and is
now in perfect health, Britain's medical journal The Lancet reported.
British newspapers Wednesday hailed the achievement as a 'miracle'
and a 'revolution.'
Scientists from Bristol University in Britain and experts from
Italy were involved in the 'pan-European' project which could lead to
the routine creation of tailor-made organs while cutting out the need
for anti-rejection drugs, the Lancet said.
To make the new airway, the doctors took a donor windpipe, or
trachea, from a patient who had recently died. They used strong
chemicals and enzymes to wash away all of the cells from the donor
trachea, leaving only a tissue scaffold made of the fibrous protein
collagen.
This enabled them to repopulate the donated trachea with cells
from Castillo's own bone marrow which was used in an operation to
repair her damaged left bronchus - a branch of the windpipe.
After four days of growth in the laboratory in a special rotating
bioreactor, the newly-coated donor windpipe was ready to be
transplanted into the patient.
'I was very much afraid. Before this, we had been doing this work
only on pigs,' said Professor Paolo Macchiarini of the Hospital
Clinic of Barcelona, Spain, who performed the operation.
'We are terribly excited by these results,' he said, adding that
the patient was 'enjoying a normal life.'
Professor Martin Birchall, professor of surgery at Bristol
University, who helped grow the cells for the transplant, said the
operation represented a huge step forward.
'Surgeons can now start to see and understand the potential for
adult stem cells and tissue engineering to radically improve their
ability to treat patients with serious diseases.'
He predicted that in 20 years time, virtually any transplant organ
could be made in this way.
US scientists have already successfully implanted bladder patches
grown in the laboratory from patients' own cells into people with
bladder disease.
The European research team also included experts from the
University of Padua and the Polytechnic of Milan in Italy.
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