The trickiest part of getting a transplant is usually finding a chump that’ll give up their organs. Sure, you can usually con someone out of something they’ve got a spare of, like kidneys or corneas. But if it’s something people really need, like their throats, you’re gonna have to wait till you can pull one from a dying donor. Until now.
Yep, Swedish surgeons have finally performed a successful transplant of an artificially grown organ into a patient. The patient? A 36-year-old African student living in Iceland, Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene, who was suffering the mild inconvenience of having a golf-ball-sized tumor filling up his windpipe. With no transplant handy and the patient used to breathing, the doctors needed to make a replacement.
They started by creating a detailed 3D scan of Beyene’s throat. Those scans were sent to researchers at the UK’s University College London, who created a copy of Beyene’s trachea and two main bronchi out of glass. That copy was flown to Sweden and coated in stem cells from Beyene’s bone marrow. After a 12-hour surgery in which the doctors removed his tumor and trachea, the doctors implanted the replacement. They also implanted bone marrow cells and cells from his nasal lining, which will grow and strengthen the replacement into a duplicate of his original trachea.
The total time for the whole process? Only two short days. So, don’t worry about taking care of your precious little windpipe. You can just get a brand new one created and flown across the world in less than a weekend.
We might just have to take up smoking again.