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To recap; the operation, on 30-year-old tuberculosis patient Claudia Castillo, took place in Barcelona, where doctors also had collected a three-inch segment of trachea from a 51-year-old donor who had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. They used a technique developed in Padua to strip the windpipe of its donor's original cells, a procedure that took six weeks, to create a "scaffold". At the same time, a team in Bristol used a "bioreactor" dreamt up in Milan to grow stem cells removed from Castillo's bone marrow. These cells were "seeded" into the donated windpipe, disguising the 'foreign' tissue that remained so Castillo's body would accept it as her own.

Now, more than 5 months later, the transplant is holding fine, and her body shows no signs of rejecting the new organ.

...the airway had been grown using the patient's own stem cells, taken from her hip and nose