First transplant of human windpipe conducted with stem cells

Img: Transplant recipient Claudia Castillo Sanchez. Credit: University of Bristol.

Doctors at four European university hospitals have performed the world's first ever successful human windpipe transplant using stem cells to prevent rejection.

After weeks of preparatory work at the universities of Barcelona, Spain, Bristol, England and Padua and Milan in Italy, the operation to transplant a windpipe was performed on thirty-year-old Colombian woman Claudia Castillo Sanchez. Castillo's own windpipe had collapsed after a persistent tuberculosis infection, leaving her dangerously short of breath.

Initial attempts to prop the windpipe open failed, leaving doctors with two options, either remove the lung or replace the windpipe using a method  previously used only on animals.

Img: Respiratory system. Credit: Public Domain/US Fed. Govt

As reported in The Lancet, the revolutionary procedure involved washing the donor windpipe twenty-five times to remove live tissue, then coating it with cartilage cells grown from Castillo's own stem cells to trick the body into accepting the donated organ as one of its own. The patient was released from the hospital ten days after the June operation with no sign of rejection and has not had to take drugs to suppress her immune system.

"We think that this first experience represents a milestone in medicine and hope that it will unlock the door for a safe and recipient-tailored transplantation of the airway in adults and children,'' said team leader Paolo Macchiarini, head of the thoracic surgery department of the Hospital Clinic in Barcelona.

Scientists have described the treatment as a "monumental step" with the possibility that it will open up other stem cell related transplants.

The University of Bristol's Professor Martin Birchall, who was an author of the study on the operation, said the operation known as "tissue engineering" indicated that doctors were on "the verge of a new age in surgical care.”

“Surgeons can now start to see and understand the very real potential for adult stem cells and tissue engineering to radically improve their ability to treat patients with serious diseases," he said.

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