‘We’re just so grateful, we are delighted they gave Ciarán a chance’

AN 11-year-old boy from the North has become the first child in the world to have pioneering surgery in which his windpipe was rebuilt using his own stem cells.

Ciarán Finn-Lynch underwent the revolutionary trachea transplant in March and was yesterday preparing to return home after the operation was hailed a success.

Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London took stem cells from the youngster’s bone marrow and injected them into a donor windpipe which had been stripped of its own cells.