Bioengineered trachea according to a new technique

A new trachea was grown for the patient in St. Petersburg

Galina Artemenko, Telegraph

A unique operation for prosthetics of the trachea of an oncological patient was performed in St. Petersburg, at the N.N. Petrov Research Institute of Oncology. According to the medical institution, the original method of autotransplantation of the trachea was developed by Professor Evgeny Levchenko.

The bioengineered prosthesis is 95% made of the patient's tissues and only 5% of the inert material used in surgical operations. This excludes the possibility of rejection of the prosthesis by the body, which will make it possible to do without immunosuppressive therapy," the correspondent of the Telegraph was informed in the medical institution.

The operation for autotransplantation of the trachea took place on May 27. The trachea was transplanted to Nina Anatolyevna F., a 58–year-old patient from Syktyvkar suffering from adenocystic tracheal cancer since 2003. A year ago, the "sleeping" tumor began to grow again, the woman began to suffocate.

The skeleton for the new trachea was a bone grown from the periosteum (used for the first time in prosthetics of the trachea).

(Perhaps there is not only a grammatical error here: it is doubtful that a flexible trachea can be replaced with a bone – VM.)

Stem cells served as a substrate for the epithelium, from the combination of which the inner surface of the trachea was created with the patient's own mucosa.

Cell cultures for bioengineered prosthesis were grown in the CCP "Cell Technologies" of the N.N. Petrov Research Institute of Oncology. The bioreactor for the prosthesis itself was the tissues of the patient's chest wall, where the new trachea matured for 6 months (at the first stage on a temporary polymer frame), including acquiring its own vascular system. The autotransplantation operation lasted 9 hours.

According to Professor Yevgeny Levchenko, the fact that the trachea is almost entirely created from the patient's own tissues and is transplanted with an already grown vascular mesh, and the mesh material used has been used for many years in abdominal operations, with a high degree of probability guarantees that the body will not reject the young organ. The use of immunosuppressive (immunosuppressive) the patient is not supposed to receive therapy that is undesirable for patients with oncological diseases.

"The risk of complications, in my opinion, in this case is no more than that of a conventional tracheal resection operation," Levchenko notes. The patient feels well, her discharge from the hospital will take place in about a month.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru 11.06.2015