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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Girl's stem cells used to grow new vein
LONDON -- For the first time, doctors have successfully transplanted a vein grown with a patient's own stem cells, another example of scientists producing human body parts in the lab.
In this case, the patient was a 10-year-old girl in Sweden who was suffering from a severe vein blockage to her liver. Last March, the girl's doctors decided to make her a new blood vessel to bypass the blocked vein instead of using one of her own or considering a liver transplant.
They took a nine-centimetre section of vein from a deceased donor and stripped it of all its cells, leaving just a hollow tube. Using stem cells from the girl's bone marrow, they grew millions of cells to cover the vein, which took about two weeks. The new blood vessel was then transplanted into the patient.
Because the procedure used her own cells, the girl did not have to take drugs to stop her immune system from attacking the new vein, as is usually the case in transplants involving donor tissue.
"This is the future for tissue engineering, where we can make tailor-made organs," said Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson of the University of Gothenburg, one of the study's authors.
She and colleagues published the results of their work online Thursday in the British medical journal Lancet. The work was paid for by the Swedish government.
The science is still preliminary and one year after the vein was transplanted, it needed to be replaced with another lab-grown vein when doctors noticed the blood flow had dropped. Experts from University College London raised questions in an accompanying commentary about how cost-effective the procedure might be, citing "acute pressures" on health systems that might make these treatments impractical for many patients.
-- The Associated Press
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 16, 2012 A18
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