26th July 2012

First Child to have Pioneering Stem Cell based Windpipe Transplant “doing well”

James Gallagher, BBC News Jul26 2012

The first child to have pioneering surgery to rebuild his windpipe using his own stem cells is doing well and is back in school.

Ciaran Finn-Lynch, who is now 13, had the ground-breaking surgery at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital in 2010.

His surgeons said things were going well so far and that Ciaran could live the life of a normal teenager.

Ciaran was born with long-segment tracheal stenosis, which causes breathing difficulties. His lungs collapsed on the day he was born, meaning he required major surgery to reconstruct his airways when he was six days old.

Metal tubes were used to hold his airways open, but in 2009 one caused huge amounts of bleeding when it damaged the main blood vessel coming out of the heart.

It was at this stage surgeons tried a pioneering operation.  A donor windpipe was found and stripped of all the donor’s cells. What was left was a three-dimensional web of collagen fibres which was transplanted into Ciaran.

Stem cells, which can become any other type of tissue-forming cell, were taken from Ciaran’s bone marrow. These were then sprayed onto the newly transplanted windpipe.

Using Ciaran’s own cells meant his immune system would not reject the organ.  There has been no sign of the transplant being rejected and “at last follow-up the boy was alive, growing, had normal lung function, and had returned to school”.

He has been monitored for the past two years and the details have been published in the Lancet.

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