Recently Russian surgeons completed the first successful laryngotracheal implants. As SmartPlanet reports, doctors built nanocomposite scaffolds outlining the shape of the needed implants. They then seeded the scaffolds with stem cells from the partients’ own bone marrow. Inside a shoebox-size bioreactor the scaffold was rotated as the stem cells took to it.
That stem cell seeding made it so the patients’s bodies accepted the implants without having to take immunosuppressive drugs.
Photo: Harvard Bioscience
