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LONDON -- For the first time doctors have successfully transplanted a vein grown with a patient's own stem cells in another example of producing human body parts in the lab.

In this case, the patient was a 10-year-old girl in Sweden who was suffering from a severe vein blockage to her liver. In March, the girl's doctors decided to make her a new blood vessel to bypass the blocked vein instead of using one of her own or considering a liver transplant.

They took a 31/2-inch section of vein from a deceased donor, which was stripped of all its cells, leaving just a hollow tube. Using stem cells from the girl's bone marrow, scientists grew millions of cells to cover the vein, a two-week process. The new blood vessel was then transplanted into the patient.

Because the procedure used her own cells, the girl did not have to take any drugs to stop her immune system from attacking the new vein, as is usually the case in transplants involving donor tissue.

Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson of the University of Gothenburg, one of the study's authors, and her colleagues published the results of their work online Thursday, June 14, in the British medical journal Lancet. The work was paid for by the Swedish government.

Bishops continue to fight mandate

ATLANTA -- The nation's Roman Catholic bishops on Wednesday promised steadfast opposition to President Barack Obama's mandate that birth control be covered by health insurance, saying it is one

Bishops insisted repeatedly that they had no partisan agenda. They said they were forced into action by state and federal policies that they said would require them to violate their beliefs in order to maintain the vast public-service network the church has built over a century or longer.

"It is not about parties, candidates or elections as others have suggested," said Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, chairman of the bishops' religious-liberty committee. "The government chose to pick a fight with us."

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Vein grown with patient's stem cells is transplanted

1:00 AM Since the new vein was transplanted, the 10-year-old with blockage to her liver is much improved.

The Associated Press

LONDON - For the first time doctors have successfully transplanted a vein grown with a patient's own stem cells, another example of scientists producing human body parts in the lab.

In this case, the patient was a 10-year-old girl in Sweden who was suffering from a severe vein blockage to her liver. Last March, the girl's doctors decided to make her a new blood vessel to bypass the blocked vein instead of using one of her own or considering a liver transplant.

They took a 3-inch section of vein from a deceased donor, which was stripped of all its cells, leaving just a hollow tube. Using stem cells from the girl's bone marrow, scientists grew millions of cells to cover the vein, a process that took about two weeks. The new blood vessel was then transplanted into the patient.

Because the procedure used her own cells, the girl did not have to take any drugs to stop her immune system from attacking the new vein, as is usually the case in transplants involving donor tissue.

"This is the future for tissue engineering, where we can make tailor-made organs for patients," said Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson of the University of Gothenburg, one of the study's authors.

She and colleagues published the results of their work online Thursday in the medical journal Lancet. The work was paid for by the Swedish government.

The science is still preliminary, and one year after the vein was transplanted, it needed to be replaced with another lab-grown vein when doctors noticed the blood flow had dropped. Experts from University College London raised questions in an accompanying commentary about how cost-effective the procedure might be, citing "acute pressures" on health systems that might make these treatments impractical for many patients.

Similar methods have already been used to make new windpipes and urethras for patients. Doctors in Poland have also made blood vessels grown from donated skin cells for dialysis patients.

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Girl's stem cells used to make her a new vein

Doctors in Sweden have replaced a vital blocked blood vessel in a 10-year-old girl using the first vein grown in a lab from a patient's own stem cells.

The successful transplant operation, reported online in The Lancet medical journal on Thursday, marks a further advance in the search for ways to make new body parts.

It could open the door to stem cell-based grafts for heart bypass and dialysis patients who lack suitable blood vessels for replacement surgery, and the Swedish team said it is now working with an undisclosed company to commercialize the process.

"I'm very optimistic that in the near future we will be able to get both arteries and veins transplanted on a large scale," said Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson, professor of transplantation biology at the University of Gothenburg, and a member of the team that performed the operation in March 2011.

The advantage of using tissue grown from a patient's own cells is that there is no risk of organ rejection and hence no need for lifelong immunosuppressive drugs.

Four years ago, a 30-year-old woman received the world's first transplant of a tailor-made windpipe, grown in a similar way by seeding a stripped-down donor organ with her own stem cells. Other such trachea operations have followed since.

The latest case involved a young girl with an obstructed hepatic portal vein, which drains blood from the intestines and spleen to the liver. Its blockage can be fatal.

The team from the University of Gothenburg took a 9 cm (3.5 inch) section of groin vein from a deceased donor and removed all the living cells, leaving just a protein scaffold tube. Stem cells extracted from the girl's bone marrow were then injected onto the tube and two weeks later the graft was implanted.

The new blood vessel immediately restored normal blood flow, the doctors said, although after a year it narrowed and a second stem cell-based graft was needed.

Martin Birchall and George Hamilton of University College London said in a commentary in The Lancet that the Swedish doctors had spared the young girl the trauma of having veins harvested from deep in her neck or leg and avoided the need for a liver transplant.

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Vein grown from stem cells saves 10-year-old girl

Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Bones / Orthopedics Also Included In: Stem Cell Research Article Date: 14 Jun 2012 - 4:00 PDT

Current ratings for: 'Fat Stem Cells Grow Bone Faster And Better'

They write about their work in the 11 June online first issue of a paper published in the new peer-reviewed journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine, which aims to span stem cell research and clinical trials.

The two co-senior authors of the study are Chia Soo, vice chair for research at University of California - Lost Angeles (UCLA) Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, and Bruno Pault, professor of Orthopedic Surgery at UCLA. Both are members of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.

Soo told the press that fat tissue is considered a good source of mesenchymal stem cells, the sort that can be coaxed to form various tissue types such as bone, cartilage and muscle, because there is plenty of it and it is easy to get hold of with procedures like liposuction.

One conventional method of growing these stem cells from fat tissue relies on culturing the fat cells for weeks to isolate the stem cells that form bone. These processes can increase the risk of infection and lead to genetic instability.

Another traditional method, called stromal vascular fraction (SVF), uses fresh, non-cultured cells, but it is not easy to extract SVF cells from fat tissue because there are many kinds of them, not all capabale of forming bone.

For this study, the researchers isolated and purified human perivascular stem cells (hPSC) from fat tissue, and using lab animals, showed these cells are a better option for making bone than SVF cells.

They also showed that a growth factor called NELL-1, speeded up bone formation.

Soo told the press:

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Fat Stem Cells Grow Bone Faster And Better