World first: grown organ transplant

Doctors in Spain have carried out the world's first transplant of an entire organ grown from the patient's own stem cells. Thirty-year-old mother of two Claudia Castillo is in perfect health five months after receiving a new windpipe grown from her own cells in Bristol.

Castillo needed the transplant to prevent her from losing a lung after she caught tuberculosis.

To make the new windpipe, doctors took a windpipe from a donor who had recently died. Strong chemicals were used to wash away all of the cells from the donor, leaving only a tissue scaffold made of collagen.

This structure was then repopulated with cells grown from Castillo herself. Using her own cells meant there was less chance of the body rejecting the implanted ogran