Toddler gets new windpipe from her own stem cells

By Alexandra Sifferlin, TIME.com

updated 9:06 AM EDT, Wed May 1, 2013

Hannah Warren, 2, recovers in a post-op room at the Children's Hospital of Illinois in Peoria.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(TIME.com) -- Hannah Warren was born without a trachea but now has one made from plastic fibers and a stew of her own stem cells.

The 2-year-old Korean Canadian has spent every day of her life in intensive care, kept alive by a tube that substituted for the windpipe that was supposed to connect her mouth to her lungs. But nearly a month after her transplant, the toddler is mostly breathing on her own and is responding to doctors and nurses.

The surgery, pioneered by Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, director of the Advanced Center for Translational Regenerative Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, was only the sixth performed in the world, and Hannah was the youngest patient and first to receive the transplant in the United States.

The procedure was approved by the FDA as an experimental operation for patients with very little hope of survival; being born without a trachea is fatal in 99% of cases.

TIME.com: Stem cell therapies may cure chronic conditions

Macchiarini performed the nine-hour operation on April 9 at the Children's Hospital of Illinois after carefully creating the windpipe using stem cells from Hannah's bone marrow that were saturated over a matrix of plastic fibers shaped into a tube.

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Toddler gets new windpipe from her own stem cells