How doctors reconstructed new esophagus tissue

New York: US doctors, including an Indian American doctor reported the first case of a human patient whose severely damaged esophagus was reconstructed using commercially available stents and skin tissues.

After the 24-year-old man was paralysed in a car crash seven years ago, doctors struggled to repair his disrupted esophagus.Despite several surgeries, the defect in the esophagus was too large to repair and it was resulting in life-threatening infection.

The team of doctors decided to try a technique previously tested only in animals, to reconstruct the upper esophagus with stents and skin tissue approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

The doctors used metal stents as a non-biological scaffold and a regenerative tissue matrix from donated human skin to rebuild a full-thickness five cm defect in the esophagus of the patient.

The tissue was then sprayed with a gel made from the patient's own blood, which contained natural substances to attract stem cells.

After five years doctors examined the man's esophagus and found that all five layers of the esophagus had re-grown, closely resembling a normal one.