Check out this Wall Street Journal article linked to here titled, "Lab-Made Trachea Saves Man," which discusses how Swedish physicians transplanted an artificial windpipe lined with the man's own stemcells into a man who was close to death because of a large tumor and now is doing well after receiving the transplant just a few weeks ago on June, 9th. There is no sign of rejection.
This is very important to the field of transplantation in general because this is the first time a windpipe has been successfully transplanted without it coming from a cadaver, or a deceased person. Therefore, this renews hope for other artificial tissues and organs to be successfully transplanted into the human body, and thus, hopefully saving many lives.
Also, this leads me to muse about possible (but unknown practical applicability)of covering donated organs and tissues with the patients own stem cells to lower the chance of the body rejecting the donated organ or tissue. This issue is briefly discussed in a Bloomberg article linked to here about this first artificially made windpipe successfully implanted into a human.
This is an exciting new frontier in the field of transplantation. In fact, we might call this the field of implantation because organs are only being implanted, not transplanted because the windpipe was not taken from a human donor.
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