Extrahepatic portal vein obstruction: Indian doctor cures 10yr old using testube veins.

Doctor Holgersson in group photograph with his team A Mumbai-born Indian doctor Suchitra Holgersson made a landmark breakthrough in medical science, as the first biologically tissue-engineered vein grown from a patient's own stem cells has been successfully transplanted into a 10-year-old girl with portal vein obstruction, dramatically enhancing her quality of life, reports The Lancet. The report says, a team of doctors, funded by the Swedish government, grew veins in test tubes and successfully transplanted them in a Swedish child. The report says, "a 10 year old girl with extrahepatic portal vein obstruction was admitted to the Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, for a bypass procedure between the superior mesenteric vein and the intrahepatic left portal vein. A 9 cm segment of allogeneic donor iliac vein was decellularised and subsequently recellularised with endothelial and smooth muscle cells differentiated from stem cells obtained from the bone marrow of the recipient. This graft was used because the patient's umbilical vein was not suitable and other strategies, like liver transplantation, require lifelong immunosuppression." The results could offer hope of growing human cells in laboratory and a potential new way for patients lacking healthy veins to undergo dialysis or heart bypass surgery without the problems of synthetic grafts (that are prone to clots and blockages) or the need for lifelong immunosuppressive drugs. Culled from NDTV