UK kid 'well and back in school' after undergoing windpipe transplant

London, July 28 (ANI): The child, who became the first to have a ground breaking 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 surgery at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital in 2010.

Using Finn-Lynch'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 Finn-Lynch 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, the BBC reported.

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 Finn-Lynch.

Meanwhile, stem cells, which can become any other type of cell, from nerve to skin cells, were taken from Finn-Lynch'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 Finn-Lynch was the first child.

"It could replace transplantation," Surgeon, Prof Martin Birchall, said in 2010.

He has been monitored for the past two years and the details have been published in the Lancet.

There has been no sign of the transplant being rejected and "at last follow-up the boy was alive, growing, had normal lung function, and had returned to school." (ANI)