14 DAY TRIAL // This past April 30, doctors working with the Children's Hospital of Illinois in Peoria went public with the results of a surgery which consisted in fitting a young girl with a trachea made from her own stem cells.
Despite the fact that said medical procedure was performed on April 9, the doctors chose to give things some time to settle before making any comments on the surgery.
The Verge informs us that, because the trachea transplanted into two-and-a-half-year-old Hannah Warren's body was bioengineered using the girl's own stem cells, the chances that the organ would be rejected were slim to none.
Specialists say the scaffold on which the girl's new trachea was built is a synthetic one, and that the stem cells were extracted from Hannah's bone marrow.
“The ultimate potential of stem-cell based therapy is to avoid human donation,” lead surgeon Paolo Macchiarini stressed.
Said surgeon hopes that, in the years to come, such procedures will cease to be a novelty and become a common practice instead.
Following the 9-hour-long surgery, Hannah appears to be well on the road to recovery.
Furthermore, doctors suspect that it is only a matter of months before her overall health condition makes it possible for her to go home.
Thanks to her new windpipe, Hannah will be able to breath, drink, eat and swallow. Prior to her undergoing this surgery, the girl needed machines in order to do any of these things.
The same source informs us that Hannah needed this new trachea because of her having been born without one. As a result of her lacking a windpipe, the girl experienced difficulties breathing.
By the looks of it, her parents decided that regenerative medicine was their best option following their looking into several other variants and realizing that no other treatment would constitute a long-term solution.
Hannah's doctors say that, as far as they know, the girl is the youngest person to have ever received a bioengineered organ transplant.