Woman gets first trachea transplant without drugs

Woman gets first trachea transplant without drugs

An international research team reported: Colombian woman has received the world's first tailor-made trachea transplant, grown by seeding a donor organ with her own stem cells to prevent her body rejecting it. The success of the operation, performed in June using tissue generated from the woman's own bone marrow, raises the prospect that transplanting other organs may be possible without drugs to dampen the immune system.

Doctors work hard to match tissue type when transplanting organs so that the body does not completely reject the new organ, but patients usually have to take immunosuppressant for the rest of their lives. Claudia Castillo sought help after a case of tuberculosis destroyed part of her trachea -- the windpipe connected to the lungs & left her with breathing difficulties, prone to
infections and unable to care for her 2 children.

The researchers said: the 30 year old's only option other than the experimental surgery was for doctors to remove part of her lung -- a choice that would have seriously degraded her quality of life. After finding a donor, the researchers first depleted the transplanted trachea of the donor's cells and then obtained bone marrow stem cells from Castillo they grew into cartilage cells. Next, the team seeded these cells on the outside of the donor trachea using a device developed at Milan Polytechnic in Italy that incubated the cells. The researchers used the same device to make epithelial cells to construct the lining of the trachea. Finally, the team grafted a 5 cm (1.97 inch) piece of the trachea onto Castillo's damaged left main bronchus, which connects the main
windpipe to the left lung.

The researchers said: Castillo, who lives in Spain, had no complications from the surgery and left the hospital after 10 days. She is returning to normal activities and even called her doctors from a night club to say she had been out dancing all night.