Spanish Surgeon Performs First Synthetic Organ Transplant

Bob the Super Hamste writes "The BBC is reporting that surgeons in Sweden have transplanted a synthetic windpipe into a patient. The synthetic windpipe was grown from a scaffolding and coated with the patients own stem cells. The scaffolding was made using 3D images of the patient's own windpipe. The new windpipe was made by scientists in London."

Re:Spanish surgeon?

[demonlapin]

Professor Paolo Macchiarini from Spain led the pioneering surgery

the 36-year-old African patient, Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene

Did you?

Re:Huge

[Telvin_3d]

Yeah, but it's a much smaller bill. Turns out that any level of 'government inefficiency' is a drop in the bucket beside the waste of having every company involved take its 50% off the top, plus executive salaries, plus lack of preventative medicine because that is an 'expense'.

Here is an excellent graphic from National Geographic [ngm.com] comparing spending to life expectancy. Despite having worse outcomes than almost every nation on the chart, the US is spending so much more that they had to be placed outside the graph. In fact, most industrialized nations are spending less than half as much as the US for better outcomes. The only countries with worse outcomes are spending less than a quarter as much per person as the US does.

So while the citizens as the United States of America may not be able to afford it, I suspect the rest of the world will do just fine.

And that assumes that this causes a net rise in health costs. My guess is that, when all is said and done, replacing damaged organs will prove much cheaper than long term treatment and complications do now.

Re:Spanish surgeon?

[jittles]

A Spanish surgeon in a Swedish facility with a British organ for an African patient. Now that is Globalization!