Successful Stem Cell Replacement of Windpipe

thepacketmaster writes "In what is being hailed as a medical milestone, CNN reports a woman suffering from long-term tuberculosis had her lower trachea and bronchial tube replaced by tissue grown from her own stem cells. A team from the universities of Barcelona, Spain; Bristol, England; and Padua and Milan, Italy, decided to go ahead with the surgery instead of having to remove her left lung. The operation, reported Wednesday in the British medical journal The Lancet, has been hailed as a major leap for medicine that could offer new hope for patients suffering from serious illness."

Comments

A step toward donorless transplants?

[StreetStealth]

FTA:

To create the new windpipe, the team took a seven-centimeter (2.75-inch) segment of trachea from a 51-year-old who had died. Over a six-week period, the team then removed all the cells from the donor trachea, because those cells could lead to rejection of the organ after transplant.

While this procedure still does require a donor organ, it basically only uses the donor as a collagen framework to grow the patient's cells into.

Could the next step be fabricating the collagen frame, perhaps through 3D printing?

Re:!embryonic

[Richard_at_work]

From what some friends of mine at Bristol Uni have been saying, yes this was done with non-embryonic stem cells, but embryonic stem cells would raise the likelihood of success in such cases as they are more likely to adapt to the required level.

And as to whether or not usage of embryonic stem cells is morally questionable, doesn't that depend on a huge set of variables, such as how the cells are harvested (you can save embryonic stem cells from the birth of a living baby for example), and your own personal beliefs?

Re:!embryonic

[HanClinto]

but embryonic stem cells would raise the likelihood of success in such cases as they are more likely to adapt to the required level.

IANAB (I am not a biologist), but if the possibility set of the patient-harvested polypotent stem cells include trachea cells, I don't see why you would need pluripotent stem cells in order for it to be a "success"?

Sadly, your friends are wrong in that if embryonic stem cells had been used in this case, that it somehow would have had a higher chance of success. The very fact that the safer and stabler ASCs (adult stem cells) were used in this operation means that the patient won't reject the organ, and the patient won't get cancer. Embryonic stem cells are too unstable in their pluripotency for them to be usable, and always go cancerous (tumor rates is one of the measures that is used to determine how well the embryonic cells have been accepted by the test mice/rats -- more tumors means that more embryonic cells lived).

you can save embryonic stem cells from the birth of a living baby for example

Sorry, but you cannot harvest truly pluripotent cells without destroying the embryo. You can get polypotent ASCs that are very nearly the equivalent of pluripotent embryonic stem cells by using cord blood stem cells, but you cannot actually gain pluripotent stem cells without destroying the living organism.

This is why many people (such as myself) are truly puzzled as to why so many people aren't more excited about ASC research -- it is usable today, and the cancer and rejection risks are so much lower than ESCs. As you noted, ASCs harvested from live births through cord blood have more than enough polypotency to treat even many neurological disorders, and they are far superior in their cancer-potential-stability.