Dr. Paola Macchiarini’s “artificial windpipe” for humans

Dr. Paolo Macchiarini. Photo by: NYT

“The human body is so beautiful; I’m convinced we must use it in the most proper way” says Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, a surgeon who is an experienced leader in the field of tissue engineering. Tissue engineers like Dr. Paolo Macchiarini aims to invent something that is more relative to human life. Dr. Paolo Macchiarini achieved this dream by building organs using the human body’s cells and letting the body itself do most of the work. “Don’t touch the patient; Just use his body to recreate his own organ. It would be fantastic” says Dr. Macchiarini, who still does not believe that his implantation of human windpipe did work as he planned the original process.

Two and a half years before Mr. Andemariam Beyene discovered a golf-ball-size tumor growing into his windpipe. Last year out of options he came to Sweden to see another doctor regarding this issue which he describes that he was “almost dead”. At the Karolinska Institute Mr. Andemariam Beyene met Dr. Paolo Macchiarini who wanted to make a new windpipe, out of plastic and his own cells. An exact copy of Mr. Beyene’s windpipe was invented by Dr. Macchiarini which was made from a porous, fibrous plastic, which was then seeded with stem cells harvested from his bone marrow. After a day and a half in a bioreactor which is a kind of incubator in which the copied windpipe was spun in a rotisserie-style, in a nutrient solution then his cancerous windpipe was implanted by stitching it into Mr. Beyene. Even though Dr. Macchiarini’s this work was experimental and costly this implantation seems increasingly optimistic about its possibilities when it was implanted in June 2011. According to medical experts an artificial windpipe has to be stripped of its cells and reseeded and it does not solve several other problems that may be just as troublesome after the implantation. However Dr. Paolo Macchiarini’s inspiring miracle made Mr. Beyene clear his doubts about this when Dr. Macchiarini first proposed it to him.

Today Mr. Beyene, who is from Eritrea, has completed 15 months after the operation and he is tumor-free and breathing normally. For a follow-up visit earlier this year, Mr. Beyene was in Stockholm and said that, “Dr. Macchiarini has convinced me in a very scientific way”. Mr. Beyene who is 39 years now, believes that his life is much better & things are getting better for him as he feels his strength was improving day by day. “We learned so much, starting from zero, “We could have never done the artificial transplant without the past experience” said Dr. Macchiarini who tried this successfully planting reseeded windpipes from cadavers in about a dozen patients beginning in the year 2008, and almost the majority patients who went through this are still living normal lives in the world today.