A number of the newspapers this morning (Saturday 20th March 2010) are reporting on groundbreaking surgery carried out by British and Italian surgeons on a ten-year-old boy at St Ormonde's Street Hospital.
In the nine hour procedure a donor windpipe was transplanted into the boy (who has not been named). To decrease the chance of the new windpipe being rejected, however, the windpipe was stripped down to its collagen scaffolding and seeded with stem cells (taken from a sample of bone marrow extracted from the child's hip) which, it is hoped, will turn into specialised cells which form the inside and outside of the windpipe. Once transplanted into the child the expectation was then that his body would act as a 'bio-reactor' to help the windpipe grow into a fully functioning organ.
One of the major problems associated with organ transplants is, of course, the possibility of the donor organ being rejected by the recipient's body. To counter this problem the patient is put onto a life long regime of immuno-suppresant drugs designed to stop the recipient's body from attacking the 'foreign' organ. The downside of this is that the recipient's weakened immune system places them at a greater risk from infections and other life-threatening illnesses such as cancer.
Developments such as this are surely of massive significance for anyone who finds themselves on the transplant waiting list in the future. It is well known that the number of available donor organs currently falls far short of the numbers needed. Furthermore, it is also known that this problem is exacerbated by the fact that the likely success of any transplant also hinges upon how close a match the donor and recipient are in terms of blood type and tissue type. Consequently the prospect of being able to use the recipient's stem cells as a potential means of getting around such issues is surely an exciting one indeed.
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