Patient makes good recovery after transplant of a bioengineered airway

doi:10.1136/bmj.a2676

Published 21 November 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a2676
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a2676

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Patient makes good recovery after transplant of a bioengineered airway

Alison Tonks

¹ Manchester

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Surgeons in Spain have successfully transplanted a bioengineeredhuman airway into a 30 year old Columbian woman with a collapsedleft main bronchus, caused by tuberculosis. The new airway,bioengineered from a donor trachea, was used to replace thewoman’s diseased bronchus on 12 June.

A report in the Lancet describes the woman as fully recovered,with normal lung function, a good quality of life, and no complications(2008 Nov 19, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(08)61598-6). She takesno immunosuppressant drugs, the graft is functioning normally,and there are no signs of rejection.

Claudia Castello is the first recipient of the new kind of graft,developed by a European team of scientists from Bristol, Padua,and Milan. They began with a 7 cm segment of trachea from a51 year old woman who had died of a brain haemorrhage. Afterstripping the trachea of all its potentially antigenic cells,the scientists reseeded . . . [Full text of this article]

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