In an extensive operation, surgeons in Warsaw, Poland, have successfully performed a throat transplant. They gave a 37-year-old man a new trachea, esophagus, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, skin, thyroid, and parathyroid glands.
The transplant procedure was performed in April and took 17 hours to complete. The organs came from a donor.
Throat transplants have only been performed twice before and those procedures were less extensive than this one. Most transplants are of a single organ, such as a heart or a kidney. A throat transplant involves many different organ systems, which means many different connections must be made, including connecting blood vessels and nerves.
Any organ or multiorgan transplant requires that the patient to take medications to suppress the immune system for the rest of his or her life. These medications prevent the organ from being rejected, but also carry many side effects, including an increased risk of cancer. Multiorgan transplantation often calls for stronger immune suppression than transplantation of a single organ.
The patient, who is going by the name Michal, had had cancer of the larynx that was very advanced. He had undergone a kidney transplant 14 years ago and has been on immune suppression drugs since then. He was diagnosed with advanced cancer of the larynx in 2009, which is when his larynx and thyroid gland were removed. Because of the surgery, he was unable to breathe, swallow, or speak.
Michal is now able to swallow liquefied foods and able to talk in a whisper.
Surgeons have implanted tracheas that were grown in a laboratory using stem cells from the patient that were seeded onto a donated trachea. Bioengineers have recently created stents for three children born with malformed tracheas by using structures made with a 3D printer and biomaterial.
