Using
plastic fibers and human cells, Dr.Paolo Macchiarini and his team have built and implanted a windpipe in a 2
½-year-old girl — the youngest person ever to receive a bioengineered organ. To make the windpipe, a half-inch diameter tube was created out of plastic fibers, bathed in a solution containing stem cells taken from the child’s bone marrow and incubated in a shoebox-size device called a bioreactor. Because the windpipe uses only the child’s own cells, there is no need for drugs to suppress the patient’s immune system to avoid rejection of the implant.
