Hope for future transplants
Part of an operation in which a man with tracheal cancer received a lab-made windpipe (June 9, 2011) Credit: AP/Karolinska University Hospital (Sweden)
First anesthesia. Then penicillin. Now synthetic organ transplants.
Modern medicine reached another milestone when doctors from the University College of London transplanted a synthetic windpipe into a 36-year-old cancer patient.
The organ was made from spongy polymers created in a lab, which were then covered with cells taken from the patient's hip and nose. Unlike transplants using organs from other humans, the artificial windpipe has almost no chance of rejection by the host, and the time spent waiting for an organ was significantly reduced -- the synthetic windpipe was created in just two days.
Will this latest advancement mean humans can begin replacing their own aging organs to extend their life spans? Probably not. That remote possibility will require more extensive research. But it may provide a glimmer of hope for some of the 25,000 patients each year who are diagnosed with cancer of the trachea, the pharynx and the larynx.
Though still far off, the day may come when kidneys, hearts, lungs and livers created in labs will be tailored to patients.
And that would be a major breakthrough. Currently there are 111,000 people on the national transplant list waiting for organs, and half will die before getting one.
Eliminating the need to find a donor match and shortening the wait time will save lives. But that is a vision that can only be realized by one of our irreplaceable organs: our brains. hN
