Tissue Engineering Regeneration of Cancerous Trachea
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Doctors in Iceland discover a very large tumor growing into a man's trachea which failed to be stopped by conventional radiation and surgical therapy. A Swedish doctor proposes and executes a radically different treatment - replacing the man's affected trachea with a new one grown from his cells. - which succeeded thus far to save the man's life. To accomplish this, a porous trachea-shaped polymer scaffold was manufactured to fit, then seeded within a bioreactor with stem cells from the man's bone marrow. After several days, the man's cancerous trachea was removed and the artificial one was implanted. In later follow-up examinations, the new trachea was found not only to have grown in fully with a network of blood vessels, but specialized ciliated cells had begun to form the lining necessary to remove mucus from the lungs by coughing.
This procedure is not yet perfect (scar tissue had to be removed from the developing trachea after some time), but it raises lots of possibility for the future advancement of tissue engineering. The same doctor had made artificial tracheas before in a similar process, but this is his first time to use a manufactured polymer scaffold rather than donor-harvested extracellular matrix. Making an artificial scaffold allows doctors to create an organ that will properly fit the patient and account for other unique circumstances.
When I did the SNBAL assignment about regrowing the bone of a rabbit's joint, I became intrigued with the possibilities and potential medical breakthroughs that tissue engineering could bring about. The ability to regrow tissue and organs comes straight out of science fiction, yet here we are using procedures like the one outlined in the article to save a man's life. There's still a lot of work to be done, but I can definitely see the medical regeneration of more complex organs and structures becoming not only possible but commonplace in my lifetime. The possibilities become even more mind-blowing when you consider what could happen when you apply this technology to healthy people - that's really when reality starts to look a lot like a scifi novel.
Doctors in Iceland discover a very large tumor growing into a man's trachea which failed to be stopped by conventional radiation and surgical therapy. A Swedish doctor proposes and executes a radically different treatment - replacing the man's affected trachea with a new one grown from his cells. - which succeeded thus far to save the man's life. To accomplish this, a porous trachea-shaped polymer scaffold was manufactured to fit, then seeded within a bioreactor with stem cells from the man's bone marrow. After several days, the man's cancerous trachea was removed and the artificial one was implanted. In later follow-up examinations, the new trachea was found not only to have grown in fully with a network of blood vessels, but specialized ciliated cells had begun to form the lining necessary to remove mucus from the lungs by coughing.
This procedure is not yet perfect (scar tissue had to be removed from the developing trachea after some time), but it raises lots of possibility for the future advancement of tissue engineering. The same doctor had made artificial tracheas before in a similar process, but this is his first time to use a manufactured polymer scaffold rather than donor-harvested extracellular matrix. Making an artificial scaffold allows doctors to create an organ that will properly fit the patient and account for other unique circumstances.
When I did the SNBAL assignment about regrowing the bone of a rabbit's joint, I became intrigued with the possibilities and potential medical breakthroughs that tissue engineering could bring about. The ability to regrow tissue and organs comes straight out of science fiction, yet here we are using procedures like the one outlined in the article to save a man's life. There's still a lot of work to be done, but I can definitely see the medical regeneration of more complex organs and structures becoming not only possible but commonplace in my lifetime. The possibilities become even more mind-blowing when you consider what could happen when you apply this technology to healthy people - that's really when reality starts to look a lot like a scifi novel.
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