A patient who had severe tuberculosis is breathing much better after receiving a transplant of a trachea seeded with her own stem cells. The work, published in the Lancet, has been reported by the New York Times. A team of researchers from four European universities took a trachea from a decesased donor, removed its cells, leaving behind the extracellular structure, and re-seeded it with mesenchymal stem cells, a cell type found in bone marrow and elsewhere that can make (among many other things) cartilage.

Tony Atala at Wake Forset University has also made organs, in this case bladders, from patients’ own cells. These have been studied in a handful of human patients. here’s a CBS story that covers this and a profile from Nature Biotechnology.

Techniques to seed scaffolds with cells are growing apace; so are collaborations among disparate types of scientists. (See Thinking in three dimensions) In the case of the trachea, the trick was not to create a new scaffold but to decellularize and existing one. Work along the same lines has been caried out by Doris Taylor of Minnesota. (See Ghost heart has a tiny beat.)