An article in the British medical journal The Lancet recently reported that physicians from four European universities had performed the first surgical transplant of a human trachea by using the patient’s stem cells.

The pioneering procedure was conducted back in June in Barcelona, Spain on a patient named Claudia Castillo, who suffered from severe shortage of breath due to a failing airway that resulted from of previous condition of tuberculosis.

The trachea transplant was performed by doctors at the universities of Barcelona, Spain, Bristol, England and Padua and Milan in Italy after several weeks of preparations.

Castillo, 30, was reported to had been admitted to the hospital in March, with a severely damaged trachea, condition which rendered her unable to make more than a few steps at a time.

According to Bristol University, the only other option the woman had was to undergo a surgical procedure to have her left lung completely removed, which posed major threats to her life, since the mortality rate concerning this kind of operation is currently very high.

Professor Paolo Macchiarini of the University of Barcelona was the one to perform the transplant, having stated that the graft had been accepted by the patient’s immune system in a matter of days. In addition, two months after the surgery, Castillo’s lungs were functioning normally, tests revealed.

In order to fashion the windpipe, physicians used a 3 inches long part of a 51-year-old donor’s trachea, which over a period of six weeks, had all the donor’s cells removed from it via a technique developed in Padua University. Afterwards, stem cells taken from Castillo’s bone marrow were used to seed the trachea through a new cell incubation method developed in Milan.