Regenerative Medicine: Tissue Engineered Airway Transplant
Regenerative Medicine and the science behind replacing body parts with synthetic tissue engineered versions took another step forwards today after researchers announced they had transplanted a trachea made of a nanomaterial covered with the patient’s own cells.
Researchers from University College London led by Prof. Alexander Seifalian designed and built a polymer based nanocomposite tracheal scaffold, which was then seeded with the patient’s own stem cells.
After two days in a bioreactor (Harvard Bioscience), the cells and the synthetic trachea scaffold were transplanted last month at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm by Prof. Paolo Macchiarini and colleagues, into a patient with late stage tracheal cancer.
