First Time Ever, Patient Gets A New Trachea Made From A Synthetic Scaffold Seeded With His Own Stem Cells

In a recent breakthrough, the first successful transplantation of a synthetic tissue engineered windpipe was performed on a patient suffering from late stage tracheal cancer on June 9th 2011, at the Karolinska University Hospital in Huddinge, Stockholm, by professor Paolo Macchiarini and his colleagues.

Professor Macchiarini, who works at the of Karolinska University Hospital and Karolinska Institutet, led an international team including professor Alexander Seifalian from the UCL (University College London, UK) and Harvard Bioscience (Boston, USA).

Professor Alexander designed and built the nanocomposite tracheal scaffold, and Harvard Bioscience produced a specifically designed bioreactor used to seed the scaffold with the patient