Windpipe transplant breakthrough

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Surgeons in Spain have carried out the world's first tissue-engineered whole organ transplant - using a windpipe made with the patient's own stem cells, reports BBC.
The groundbreaking technology also means for the first time tissue transplants can be carried out without the need for anti-rejection drugs.
Five months on the patient, 30-year-old mother-of-two Claudia Castillo, is in perfect health, The Lancet reports. She needed the transplant to save a lung after contracting tuberculosis. The disease had damaged her airways.
Scientists from Bristol helped grow the cells for the transplant and the European team believes such tailor-made organs could become the norm.
To make the new airway, the doctors took a donor windpipe, or trachea, from a patient who had recently died.
Then they used strong chemicals and enzymes to wash away all of the cells from the donor trachea, leaving only a tissue scaffold made of the fibrous protein collagen.
This gave them a structure to repopulate with cells from Ms Castillo herself, which could then be used in an operation to repair her damaged left bronchus - a branch of the windpipe.
By using Ms Castillo's own cells the doctors were able to trick her body into thinking the donated trachea was part of it, thus avoiding rejection.