| Doctors in Sweden have replaced a vital blocked blood vessel in a 10-year-old girl using the first vein grown in a lab from a patient's own stem cells. The successful transplant operation, reported online in The Lancet medical journal on Thursday, marks a further advance in the search for ways to make new body parts. |
The patient had poor blood flow between her intestines and liver, so a vein was taken from a dead man, stripped of its own cells and then bathed in stem cells from the girl, according to a study published in The Lancet.
This is the latest is a series of body parts grown, or engineered, to match the tissue of the patient.
A blockage in the major blood vessel linking the intestines and the liver can cause serious health problems including internal bleeding and even death. In this case, other options such as using artificial grafts to bypass the blockage, had failed.
Doctors at the University of Gothenburg and Shalgrenska University Hospital tried to make a vein out of the patient's own cells. It used a process known as decellularisation.
It starts with a donor vein which is then effectively put through a washing machine in which repeated cycles of enzymes and detergents break down and wash away the person's cells. Decellurisation leaves behind a scaffold. This is then bathed in stem cells from the 10-year-old's bone marrow. The end product is a vein made from the girl's own cells.
The doctors said, "The new stem-cell derived graft resulted not only in good blood flow rates, but also in strikingly improved quality of life for the patient."
SOURCE BBC News
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