The world's first tissue-engineered whole organ transplant has been a success!

Four months after the transplant of a section of her windpipe, Claudia Castillo is healthy and happy to be able to look after her children again.

Transplants using another person's organs are often rejected by the immune system of the recipient, and so immuno-suppressive drugs must be taken. In Claudia's case, they were not needed because the transplanted tissue was made using her own stem cells.

A donor was still needed to provide the scaffold of collagen in which to grow new cells.

Collagen is a protein used for many structures in our body, including cartilage, skin and bone. Read more here.

The donor's own cells were removed from the section of the windpipe, to leave just the collagen.  Stem cells from Claudia's hip bone and healthy cells from her windpipe were then allowed to grow in the collagen scaffold for four days before the new organ was used to surgically replace the diseased tissue.

This breakthrough opens possibilities for growing more organs from patients' own cells -  "self" transplants without the risk of rejection!

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