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April 07, 2021For the first time in the world, a complete tracheal transplant was performed on a patient whose organ was damaged six years ago after a series of intubations at Mount Sinai hospital in New York.
The surgery, explains the clinic's press release, took place last January 13, and the patient, a 56-year-old woman, is in good health at the moment.
The trachea, the "tube" that connects the larynx to the lungs, has always been considered very difficult to transplant due to the complexity of the blood vessels that run through it.
The surgery lasted 18 hours and required over 50 specialists.
The trachea was taken from the donor and rebuilt in the recipient, and the different small blood vessels that carry oxygen to the organ were connected, meanwhile using a portion of the esophagus and thyroid to supply blood to the tissue that was being rebuilt.
"For the first time we can offer a treatment option to patients with severe tracheal defects," says team leader Eric Genden. "This is particularly timely given the growing number of patients with tracheal problems due to covid intubation. our transplant and revascularization protocol is reliable, reproducible and technically advanced ".
In the past decades there have been several attempts to intervene on the trachea.
The Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini attempted the path of organ reconstruction with stem cells, but his line of research was strongly contested by the Karolinska Institut in Stockholm, where he operated, and never caught on.
In 2018, a donor's aorta was used in France, stabilized by an artificial structure and "transformed" into a trachea.