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A 10-YEAR-OLD girl in Sweden is the world’s first recipient of a donated vein treated with her own stem cells.
of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and her colleagues obtained the 9-centimetre-long section of vein from the groin of a cadaver. They stripped the vein of all the donor’s cells using strong detergents, leaving just the underlying protein scaffold.
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Next, they extracted stem cells from the girl’s bone marrow, differentiated them into cells that line blood vessels, and used the resulting cells to coat the surfaces of the donated vein before implanting it into the girl.
Because it was coated with her own cells, and the donor’s cells had disappeared, the vein was accepted by the girl’s body without any need for immunosuppressive drugs ()60633-3).