Surgeons implant first wholly lab-grown organ

A 36-YEAR-old man is recovering after surgeons implanted the world’s first wholly lab-grown organ into his body.

The synthetic trachea, or windpipe, was created by seeding the patient’s own stem cells onto an artificial “scaffold”.

British scientists helped design and built the structure, a replica of the man’s original windpipe. Windpipes have been grown from stem cells before, but only using the collagen “skeletons” of donated tracheas.

Using an entirely synthetic scaffold means patients do not have to wait for a suitable donor organ. This is especially important for children, for whom donor tracheas are much more difficult to find.

The patient, an African student living in Iceland, had been suffering from life-threatening tracheal cancer. Spanish regenerative medicine pioneer Professor Paolo Macchiarini led the ground-breaking operation at Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden.

In 2008 he carried out the world’s first tissue-engineered tracheal transplant on a 30-year-old Spanish woman, Claudia Costillo. Prof Alexander Seifalian, from University College London, worked with Prof Macchiarini to produce the synthetic trachea scaffold.