A teen in the U.K. is living a healthy life two years after he received a new trachea built from his own stem cells, a new report from researchers at the Harvard Medical School confirmed. The boy, 13-year-old Ciaran Finn-Lynch, was born with an abnormally small wind pipe and went through several treatments before receiving the stem-cell option.
Ciaran's natural windpipe was so small it repeatedly forced his lungs to collapse. He initially had metal pipes inserted to keep the space open, but they eventually eroded.
As he aged and stem cell technology developed, doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital near London were able to grow a new trachea using cells from his own bone marrow.
Harald C. Ott, MD, an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, helped developed some of the technology that went into the procedure and said "it's a really heroic story," adding the doctors "really saved this kid's life."
Ciaran is now healthy and has returned to school. He has not yet needed any treatments to avoid organ rejection and there are signs the trachea may grow with his body. Ciaran's case was the first time doctors literally grew the organ inside the child, skipping the normal growing phase in a bioreactor.
"We did not have the time to engineer and to culture the cells in a bioreactor because this child needed to have something done quickly. We used the child, himself, as a bioreactor," surgeon Paolo De Coppi, MD, PhD, said. "For him, there was no other option."
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