The Hindu : Front Page : Doctors now transplant windpipe with stem cells

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Thursday, Nov 20, 2008
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Doctors now transplant windpipe with stem cells

LONDON: Doctors have given a woman a new windpipe with tissue grown from her own stem cells, eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs.

“This technique has great promise,” said Eric Genden, who was not involved in the research, and who did a similar transplant in 2005. That operation used both donor and recipient tissue. Only a handful of windpipe transplants have ever been done.

The results were published online in the The Lancet.

The transplant was given to Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old Colombian mother of two living in Barcelona who suffered from tuberculosis for years. After a severe collapse of her left lung in March, Ms. Castillo needed hospital visits to clear her airways.

Doctors initially thought the only solution was to remove the entire left lung. But Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, head of thoracic surgery at Barcelona’s Hospital Clinic, proposed a windpipe transplant instead. Once doctors had a donor windpipe, scientists at Italy’s University of Padua stripped off all its cells, leaving only a tube of connective tissue.

Meanwhile, doctors at the University of Bristol took a sample of Ms. Castillo’s bone marrow from her hip. They used the bone marrow’s stem cells to create millions of cartilage and tissue cells to cover and line the windpipe.

Experts at the University of Milan then used a device to put the new cartilage and tissue onto the windpipe. The new windpipe was transplanted onto Ms. Castillo in June.

“They have created a functional, biological structure that can’t be rejected,” said Dr. Allan Kirk of the American Society of Transplantation. “It’s an important advance, but constructing an entire organ is still a long way off.” The potential beneficiaries include children born with defective airways and people with scars or tumours in windpipes. — AP

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