- guardian.co.uk, Thursday November 20 2008 00.01 GMT
- The Guardian, Thursday November 20 2008
- Article history
The unlocking of knowledge that seems to happen on an almost daily basis through stem cell research passed an extraordinary milestone yesterday with the announcement that a young Colombian woman had received the first tailor-made replacement organ.
Little more than a decade after stem cells were first isolated by Dr James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin, it seems the great hopes invested in them are already starting to be realised.
A trans-European interdisciplinary team that included scientists and surgeons in Bristol, Italy and Spain successfully
transplanted a section of windpipe from a human donor which had been stripped of its biological identity and then clothed in cartilage specially cultured from Claudia Castillo's own bone marrow stem cells, avoiding the need for powerful immunosuppressive drugs.
As the Lancet drily reported, "This patient provides new evidence that autologous cells combined with appropriate biomaterials might provide, in future, successful functional solutions for serious clinical disorders." There is still a long way to go before the complex organs - the hearts, lungs, livers and kidneys - will be tailor-made, but it no longer looks like fantasy. This was a notable European triumph, a tribute in particular to the UK regulatory framework that enabled the stem cell research to make such rapid strides.
Now the election of Barack Obama, committed to removing the block on federal funding for most stem cell research in the US, can only speed the process.
