{"id":5114,"date":"2013-07-10T11:02:01","date_gmt":"2013-07-10T15:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/?p=5114"},"modified":"2013-07-16T09:19:01","modified_gmt":"2013-07-16T13:19:01","slug":"toddlers-death-prompts-reflection-on-bioengineered-tissue-transplants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/2013\/07\/toddlers-death-prompts-reflection-on-bioengineered-tissue-transplants.html","title":{"rendered":"Toddler\u2019s death prompts reflection on bioengineered tissue transplants"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tissue<\/a>

{credit}Robert A. Lisak{\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

There was sad news over the weekend that the youngest patient to ever receive a bioengineered trachea seeded with her own bone marrow\u2013derived stem cells\u00a0had died. Hannah Warren, who was born without a windpipe, received the artificial trachea at Children\u2019s Hospital of Illinois in Peoria in April. It was only the sixth procedure of its kind and the first to be performed in the US. She would have turned three next month.<\/p>\n

Doctors involved in the girl\u2019s treatment told the New York Times<\/i><\/a> that her death was not related to the bioengineered organ. Rather, her native tissue around the esophagus didn\u2019t heal properly, necessitating another operation. She ultimately died from complications of that second operation. \u201cThe trachea was never a problem,\u201d said Paolo Macchiarini<\/a>, a surgeon at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who led the girl\u2019s tracheal implant and has spearheaded the protocol around the world.<\/p>\n

The news got me thinking about a feature article<\/a> I wrote two years ago about a similar procedure in which a toddler, about the same age as Hannah Warren, received a tissue-engineered blood vessel to correct a congenital heart defect known as a \u2018single-ventricle anomaly\u2019. The problem is fatal without surgical correction.<\/p>\n

The bioengineered blood vessel, like the artificial trachea, starts out as a tube of plastic fibers. Doctors then add a patient\u2019s own cells, taken from the bone marrow, and implant the construct after just a few hours of incubation. Twenty-five people received this treatment in Japan throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, but this was the first such procedure in the US.<\/p>\n

So how is that child doing today? \u201cI am happy to report our first patient is still doing well nearly two years after her surgery,\u201d Christopher Breuer<\/a> told me in an email this week.<\/p>\n

Breuer and his colleague Toshiharu Shinoka<\/a> completed the operation in August 2011 at the Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. The two pediatric surgeons have since moved to Columbus, Ohio, where they codirect the Tissue Engineering Program<\/a> at Nationwide Children\u2019s Hospital. They continue to see their one patient from the blood vessel trial every six months and talk to her parents on the phone about once a month. But the move to Ohio has temporarily delayed further study enrollment.<\/p>\n

They should be recruiting participants again soon, though. \u201cWe have recently completed construction of our new facilities,\u201d says Breuer, \u201cand will hopefully be enrolling more patients later this year.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the bioengineered tracheas, Macchiarini told the Times<\/i> that he would continue with similar operations, including one scheduled for Stockholm this week. It\u2019s clear that with Hannah Warren\u2019s death, the risks of the procedure will be foremost in researchers\u2019 thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was sad news over the weekend that the youngest patient to ever receive a bioengineered trachea seeded with her own bone marrow\u2013derived stem cells\u00a0had died. Hannah Warren, who was born without a windpipe, received the artificial trachea at Children\u2019s Hospital of Illinois in Peoria in April. It was only the sixth procedure of its kind and the first to be performed in the US. She would have turned three next month.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[248,250,241,249],"class_list":["post-5114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stem-cellscloning","tag-bioengineered","tag-blood-vessel","tag-tissue-engineering","tag-trachea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}