Woman gets first stem cell windpipe

A Colombian woman has received the world's first tailor-made trachea windpipe transplant, grown by seeding a donor organ with her own stem cells to prevent her body rejecting it, an international research team reported yesterday.

The success of the operation, performed in June using tissue generated from the woman's own bone marrow, raises the prospect that transplanting other organs may be possible without drugs to dampen the immune system, they said.

Doctors work hard to match tissue type when transplanting organs so that the body does not completely reject the new organ, but patients usually have to take immunosuppressants for the rest of their lives.