Earlier this year, I saw this episode of Nova where they discussed growing replacement organs for people who need transplants. Transplant surgery is always tricky both because finding donors is hard and because the body rejects transplanted organs. Recipients have to take incredibly powerful drugs in order to suppress the immune system to the point where the transplant won’t kill the recipient.
So a lot of research has gone into various ways of making transplants easier, and now, one of them seems to have come to fruition. Doctors in Sweden built a trachea for a patient around a synthetic scaffold out of the patient’s own stem cells, thus removing any issue with tissue rejection. The patient is apparently doing well and should be released from the hospital soon.
