New York Times – By Henry Fountain – Andemariam Beyene sat by the hospital window, the low Arctic sun on his face, and talked about the time he thought he would die. Irina Gilevich, at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, spread cells from rat bone marrow on a plastic windpipe. The plastic is spun in a nutrient solution in a bioreactor to allow the cells to take hold. Two and a half years ago doctors in Iceland, where Mr. Beyene was studying to be an engineer, discovered a golf-ball-size tumor growing into his windpipe. Despite surgery and radiation, it kept growing. In the spring of 2011, when Mr. Beyene came to Sweden to see another doctor, he was practically out of options. “I was almost dead,” he said. “There was suffering. A lot of suffering.” But the doctor, Paolo Macchiarini, at the Karolinska Institute here, had a radical idea. He wanted to make Mr. Beyene a new windpipe, out of plastic and his own cells.
WSCS Speaker, Karolinka’s Paolo Macchiarini, Building Organs With Body’s Own Cells
