A 10-year-old British boy has become the first child to undergo a windpipe transplant with an organ crafted from his own stem cells.

一位10岁的英国男孩成为世界上首位接受气管移植手术的儿童，被移植的器官是使用他身体中的干细胞创造的。

This is the third such transplant to be done, and the first in a child

It is hoped that using the boy's own tissue in the nine-hour operation at Great Ormond Street Hospital will cut the risk of rejection¹.

The world's first tissue-engineered windpipe（气管，嗓门） transplant was done in Spain in 2008 but with a shorter graft²（嫁接，移植） .

Doctors say the boy is doing well and breathing normally.

He has a rare condition called Long Segment Congenital Tracheal Stenosis, in which patients are born with an extremely narrow airway³.

At birth his airway was just one millimetre across.

Doctors had previously⁴ operated to expand his airway but in November last year he suffered complications（并发症） from erosion（侵蚀，腐蚀） of a metal stent（支架，展伸） in his windpipe or trachea（气管，导管） .

In order to build him a new airway, doctors took a donor⁵ trachea, stripped it down to the collagen（胶原） scaffolding（脚手架） , and then injected stem cells taken from his bone marrow⁶（骨髓） .

The organ was then implanted in the boy and over the next month, doctors expect the stem cells to transform into specialised cells which form the inside and outside of the trachea.

Pioneering

Two years ago, Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old mother of two, became the first person to receive a transplant organ created from stem cells.

She received a new section of trachea after her own had been damaged by tuberculosis⁷（肺结核） .

The latest operation is a significant advance on that pioneering work, as it is the first time a whole tissue engineered windpipe has been transplanted.

Also in Ms Castillo's case, doctors grew the new tissue from her stem cells in the laboratory.

But in the UK operation, the donor windpipe was treated with a cocktail⁸ of chemicals designed to prompt the stem cells to grow into new tissue once inside the body.

Professor Martin Birchall, head of translational regenerative medicine at University College London, who was part of the team behind the operation, said it was a "real milestone⁹".