Dr. Jalaledin Ghanavi, general surgeon and head of the tissue engineering department at NRITLD (Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences) has successfully transplanted an artificial trachea for the first time in the world on a patient without the need for surgery or immunosuppressants. In the first injection, an innovative material was injected into trachea to provide the scaffold for the trachea. Then, the patient’s stem cells, in proximity to this new matrix, were differentiated into cartilage cells. In the second injection stage, epithelial cells were placed on the bed of the grown cells to reconstruct the inner lining of the trachea. This method regenerates the trachea without the use of surgery or immunosuppressive drugs. This new treatment method is in fact a type of ‘in situ tissue engineering’. This new method would be applicable to the treatment of congenital abnormalities, tracheal cancer, and chronic tracheal diseases.
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