Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Catholic Online) - A Spanish woman made medical history recently by receiving a new windpipe which had been grown from her own stem cells. The announcement has brought tremendous excitement among the pro-life as well as medical communities. The former group cited this as additional evidence that adult stem cell research, which is in complete accord with catholic social teaching, is producing real results. Claudia Castillo is a 30 year-old mother from Barcelona, Spain with a collapsed trachea, due to tuberculosis, that left her unable to breathe. Using a graft from a donor that was imbued with stem cells...

Tissue engineering has made possible this doubly innovative operation - the first trachea transplant and the first tissue transplant to be performed without the need for immunosuppression. Professor Paolo Macchiarini, Head of the thoracic surgery department of Hospital Clínic has led the basic research and the international team formed by the universities of Bristol, Padua and Milan, who contributed to this success. The transplanted tissue is a hybrid from a donor that was repopulated with stem and epithelial cells from the recipient. Five months later, Claudia Castillo, who required the operation to save a lung following tuberculosis, is in perfect...

A woman has been given a new section of windpipe created from her own stem cells in an operation that could revolutionise surgery. Claudia Castillo, 30, who lives in Barcelona, has become the first person to be given a whole organ tailor-made for her in laboratories across Europe. A graft from a donor was used, but because it has been imbued with Ms Castillo’s own cells, there is no sign that her body will reject the organ. Researchers and surgeons from Britain, Italy and Spain collaborated to grow tissue from Ms Castillo’s own bone marrow stem cells, using them to...

Boston doctors used cells taken from a pregnant lamb's amniotic fluid to grow a new trachea, then implanted the organ into the ailing fetus, an experiment that may pave the way for similar treatment in humans. Using cells from amniotic fluid to repair or replace human organs may bypass some of the political and ethical obstacles doctors encounter with fetal cells, said Children's Hospital Boston pediatric surgeon Dario Fauza, who led the experiments. "You avoid all the ethical dilemmas of the embryonic stem cell," Fauza said. "The cells are already there" in the mother's amniotic fluid. "We are just harvesting...