Barcelona, Spain, Nov 20, 2008 / 00:40 am
A June operation at a Spanish hospital has resulted in the first successful trachea transplant operation using adult stem cells.
The operation, performed at Hospital Clinic in Barcelona, was detailed in Wednesday’s online edition of the British medical journal The Lancet.
The 30-year-old female patient from Colombia, named Claudia Castillo, had suffered a left airway collapse as a result of tuberculosis. A stent implanted to reopen the airway failed to work.
Doctors used a trachea provided by an organ donor as a framework for their novel transplant. Stripping the trachea of cells that would have faced immune system rejection in a transplant, they took adult stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow and other cells from the healthy right airway of her trachea.