25 July 2012 Last updated at 21:04 ET By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

The first child to have pioneering surgery to rebuild his windpipe with his own stem cells is doing well and is back in school.

Ciaran Finn-Lynch, who is now 13, had the ground-breaking surgery at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital in 2010.

Using Ciaran's own cells meant his immune system would not reject, and attack, the organ.

His surgeons said things were going well so far and that Ciaran could live the life of a normal teenager.

He was born with long-segment tracheal stenosis, which causes breathing difficulties. His lungs collapsed on the day he was born and he had major surgery to reconstruct his airways when he was six days old.

Metal tubes were used to hold his airways open, but in 2009 one caused huge amounts of bleeding when it damaged the main blood vessel coming out of the heart.

It was at this stage surgeons tried a pioneering operation. Instead of growing a new windpipe, they took a donor windpipe and stripped it of all the donor's cells. What was left was a three-dimensional web of collagen fibres which was transplanted into Ciaran.

Meanwhile, stem cells, which can become any other type of cell, from nerve to skin cells, were taken from Ciaran's bone marrow. These were then sprayed onto the newly transplanted windpipe.

The surgery had been tried once before in Spain, in 2008, on a 30-year-old woman, but Ciaran was the first child.

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Stem-cell op child 'doing well'

MOBILE, Alabama -- Adult stem cells extracted during liposuction can be used to grow healthy new small-diameter blood vessels for use in heart bypass surgery and other procedures, new research shows.

The findings were presented today at the American Heart Association's Basic Cardiovascular Sciences 2012 Scientific Sessions in New Orleans.

The reason that's important, health officials said, is because millions of cardiovascular disease patients are in need of small-diameter vessel grafts for procedures requiring blood to be routed around blocked arteries.

These liposuction-derived vessels, grown in a lab, could help solve major problems associated with grafting blood vessels from elsewhere in the body or from using artificial blood vessels that are not living tissue, said Matthias Nollert, Ph.D., the lead author of the study, in a written statement.

Now, Nollert said, "small-diameter vessel grafts carry an inherent risk of clotting, being rejected or otherwise failing to function normally."

Nollert said the engineered blood vessels have good mechanical properties and "we believe they will contract normally when exposed to hormones. They also appear to prevent the accumulation of blood platelets -- a component in blood that causes arteries to narrow."

Here's how it works:

In the study, according to the American Heart Association, adult stem cells derived from fat are turned into smooth muscle cells in a laboratory, and then "seeded" onto a very thin collagen membrane.

As the stem cells multiplied, the researchers rolled them into tubes matching the diameter of small blood vessels. In three to four weeks, they grew into usable blood vessels.

Creating blood vessels with this technique has the potential for "off-the-shelf" replacement vessels that can be used in graft procedures, Nollert said.

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Stem cells from fat used to grow blood vessels in lab, research shows

In a Tissue-Engineering First, Doctors Think the Boy's New Windpipe Could Grow

July 25, 2012 -- Ciaran Finn-Lynch is an accidental medical pioneer. With his life in danger, doctors used the 13-year-old's own stem cells to grow him a new windpipe, and they did it inside his body -- a feat that's never been accomplished before.

"It's a really heroic story," says Harald C. Ott, MD, an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "They really saved this kid's life."

Ott worked out some of the science that made the procedure possible but was not directly involved in Ciaran's treatment.

Two years after the surgery, doctors say Ciaran (pronounced KEER-an) is living the life of a normal teen. He's grown more than 4 inches and gone back to school. Best of all, he has no need for an expensive and complicated regimen of anti-rejection drugs.

What doctors are learning from his case could help thousands of children born each year with life-threatening birth defects.

Ciaran was born with a windpipe so small and deformed that it caused his lungs to collapse.

Doctors managed to hold his airway open using metal tubes. But eventually the tubes eroded into his aorta, the large vessel that carries blood out of the heart. He was rushed to the hospital with massive bleeding. Twice.

The second time, the bleeding stopped on its own. That gave his doctors a small window of time to look for other options.

Two years earlier, scientists had devised a new way to create organs using a patient's own stem cells. Though the technique had only been tried in adults, they thought the same method might work for Ciaran.

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Doctors Report Historic Transplant in Child

ROCKVILLE, Md., July 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --Neuralstem, Inc. (NYSE MKT: CUR) announced that the seventeenth patient was treated in the ongoing Phase I trial of its spinal cord neural stem cells for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease). This patient is also the second to return to the trial for additional injections. In this treatment, the patient received five injections in the cervical (upper back) region of the spinal cord, in addition to the ten he had previously received in the lumbar (lower back) region, for a total of 15 injections. The final previously treated patient of this cervical cohort is expected to return to the trial in August, provided the inclusion requirements continue to be met. This ground-breaking stem cell trial is taking place at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20061221/DCTH007LOGO )

"We are pleased that this phase of the trial, in which we have been permitted by the FDA to take the unprecedented step of dosing patients for the second time, is progressing as planned," said Karl Johe, PhD, Neuralstem's Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer. "These are the first patients in the world to receive our cells in both the lumbar and cervical regions of their spinal cords, where the stem cell therapy could support both walking and breathing."

About the Trial

The Phase I trial to assess the safety of Neuralstem's spinal cord neural stem cells and intraspinal transplantation method in ALS patients has been underway since January 2010. The trial is designed to enroll up to 18 patients. The first 12 patients were each transplanted in the lumbar (lower back) region of the spine, beginning with non-ambulatory and advancing to ambulatory cohorts.

The trial then advanced to transplantation in the cervical (upper back) region of the spine. The first cohort of three was treated in the cervical region only. The current cohort of three is receiving injections in both the cervical and lumbar regions of the spinal cord. In an amendment to the trial design, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the return of previously treated patients to this cohort. The second of these returning patients was just treated. The entire 18-patient trial concludes six months after the final surgery.

About Neuralstem

Neuralstem's patented technology enables the ability to produce neural stem cells of the human brain and spinal cord in commercial quantities, and the ability to control the differentiation of these cells constitutively into mature, physiologically relevant human neurons and glia. Neuralstem is in an FDA-approved Phase I safety clinical trial for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease, and has been awarded orphan status designation by the FDA.

In addition to ALS, the company is also targeting major central nervous system conditions with its cell therapy platform, including spinal cord injury, ischemic spastic paraplegia and chronic stroke. The company has submitted an IND (Investigational New Drug) application to the FDA for a Phase I safety trial in chronic spinal cord injury.

Neuralstem also has the ability to generate stable human neural stem cell lines suitable for the systematic screening of large chemical libraries. Through this proprietary screening technology, Neuralstem has discovered and patented compounds that may stimulate the brain's capacity to generate new neurons, possibly reversing the pathologies of some central nervous system conditions. The company is in a Phase Ib safety trial evaluating NSI-189, its first neurogenic small molecule compound, for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD). Additional indications could include CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), Alzheimer's disease, anxiety, and memory disorders.

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Seventeenth Patient Dosed in Neuralstem ALS Stem Cell Trial

ScienceDaily (July 25, 2012) With an eye to the future, the results will let cells be obtained in the laboratory that can be transplanted into leukemia patients with no compatible donors.

Researchers from IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) have deciphered the function executed by a protein called -catenin in generating blood tissue stem cells. These cells, also called hematopoietic, are used as a source for transplants that form part of the therapies to fight different types of leukemia. The results obtained will open the doors to produce these stem cells in the laboratory and, thus, improve the quality and quantity of these surgical procedures. This will let patients with no compatible donors be able to benefit from this discovery in the future.

The study, executed jointly with the Erasmus Medical Center Stem Cell of Rotterdam and published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, analyzed a chain of molecular reactions that are produced inside some embryonic cells and that play a role in the creation of a hematopoietic stem cells. 'Our study contributes to deciphering the code that makes a precursor cell that is only found in the embryo become a hematopoietic stem cell. In order for that to happen, the -catenin protein must be activated for a while and with a specific dosage' explains Dr Anna Bigas, head of the IMIM Stem Cells & Cancer Group and lead researcher.

This protein also plays a fundamental role in the cells that originate and maintain some types of leukemia. 'The parallelisms between normal and leukemia stem cells prove to us that the molecular pathways that regulate both populations are the same. For this reason, our work will help us understand the origin of these diseases', argues Dr Bigas.

In addition to embryonic stem cells, each of our body's organs has another type of stem cell that has the capacity to regenerate all the cells for the tissue in question. However, they are only formed in the embryonic stage and are maintained for the rest of our lives. hematopoietic stem cells are part of the blood and, when they are transplanted, they are the inception for all of this tissue's cells.

At present, transplanting these cells is dependent on the availability of compatible donors. Nonetheless, there is still a high percentage of patients with no donors and that, therefore, cannot be submitted to this procedure. The results of this article lay the foundations so that, in the future, these patients can benefit from a source of laboratory-generated hematopoietic stem cells created from compatible embryonic cells or other types of expressly transformed cells.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by IMIM (Hospital del Mar Research Institute).

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Key function of protein discovered for obtaining blood stem cells as source for transplants