Posted on 01/15/2012 9:43:14 PM PST by neverdem
Surgeons in Sweden have replaced the cancerous windpipe of a Maryland man with one made in a laboratory and seeded with the man’s cells.
The windpipe, or trachea, made from minuscule plastic fibers and covered in stem cells taken from the man’s bone marrow, was implanted in November. The patient, Christopher Lyles, 30, whose tracheal cancer had progressed to the point where it was considered inoperable, arrived home in Baltimore on Wednesday. It was the second procedure of its kind and the first for an American.
“I’m feeling good,” Mr. Lyles said in a telephone interview from his home, where he was playing with his 4-year-old daughter. “I’m just thankful for a second chance at life.” He said he hoped to resume his job, as an electrical engineer with the Department of Defense, as soon as he regained full strength.
“He went home in very good shape,” said Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, director of the Advanced Center for Translational Regenerative Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
Dr. Macchiarini is a leader in the field of tissue engineering, in which the goal is to produce replacement tissues and organs outside the body. Research in the field has undergone a resurgence in recent years because of advances in understanding stem cells — undifferentiated cells that can proliferate and be induced to become cells of a specific type of tissue.
“What we did is surgically remove his malignant tumor,” Dr. Macchiarini said. “Then we replaced the trachea with this tissue-engineered scaffold.” The Y-shaped scaffold, fashioned from nano-size fibers of a type of plastic called PET that is commonly used in soda bottles, was seeded with stem cells from Mr. Lyles’s bone marrow. It was then placed in a bioreactor — a shoebox-size container holding the stem cells in solution — and rotated like...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
FReepmail me if you want on or off my stem cell ping list.
It seems likely that if I want to pay for it, and go through the trouble, in a few years they well be able to replace my missing left kidney and maybe my spleen. (not that I really miss either)
/johnny
PVC pipes? Cool.
Although I wonder why they are still working on medical miracles when in a few years, they will just let us all die if it is too expensive for us to be saved.
Good point. STOP obama/romneycare now.
This is pretty amazing; they have done this in the past with a body part that had been stripped of everything except the structural material (collagen?).
It truly is amazing, I agree. But the point was with Romney/Obamacare who will be able to use it, certainly not the little people.
PVC is polyvinyl chloride. I'm pretty sure that PET means Polyethylene Terephthalate in this case. It's used for plastic bottles.
I may need to get me one of those.
WOW! Who would have thought. Can you imagine your kidney and spleen rotating on a chicken rotisserie waiting to be installed.
“WOW! Who would have thought. Can you imagine your kidney and spleen rotating on a chicken rotisserie waiting to be installed.”
Just as long as they aren’t cooking it to eat it.
Will artificial spleens have vents built in to them, so you can vent your spleen at will? (duck’n & runn’n)
Liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti?
and a nice MAO inhibitor, makes you blow your top! (literally)
LOL.... I wonder, would someone say its taste like chicken.
Wow. Good for him.
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
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