maintain rigidity to prevent airway collapse when the patient breathes.The trachea engineering strategy now being pursued at Case Western Reserve and WPI, however, wouldn’t have those problems because it doesn’t rely on a separate scaffold structure, Alsberg said.Īccording to Alsberg’s research, a new trachea replacement must do three critical things to function properly: Recent tissue-engineering approaches using synthetic or natural materials as scaffolding for cells have been met with challenges.ĭifficulties have included uniformly seeding cells on the scaffolding, recreating the multiple different tissue types found in the native trachea, tailoring the scaffolding degradation rate to equal the rate of new tissue formation, and recreating important contacts between cells because of the intervening scaffold. Other procedures, such as implanting a stent or simply clearing away tissue obstructing the airway, offer only short-term relief as the repaired tube tends to close off again after about a year. If a portion of the trachea is damaged, for example, they can only surgically join the ends if less than half of the trachea is damaged in adults or less than 30 percent in children. Damage to or loss of trachea tissue can be life-threatening or lead to a significantly reduced quality of life, Alsberg said.ĭoctors have limited solutions for patients with damaged tracheas. Patients may need a rebuilt trachea because of tumor resection or an injury that results in tracheal stenosis, a narrowing or constricting of the windpipe, which inhibits breathing. The trachea, commonly called the windpipe, is the airway between the voice box and the lungs. The research was supported by a $1.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering awarded to Alsberg and Rolle. “The unique approach we are taking to this problem of trachea damage or loss is forming tissue modules using a patient’s cells and assembling them like the childhood toy Legos into a more complex tissue,” said Alsberg, who is leading the research. Calvin Cotton, a professor of pediatrics and physiology and biophysics at Case Western Reserve, and nine researchers from Alsberg’s lab, including co-first authors Anna Dikina and Daniel Alt, are the paper’s other co-authors. Marsha Rolle, associate professor of biomedical engineering at WPI, and Hannah Strobel, a graduate student in biomedical engineering, are co-authors with Alsberg of a paper in the most recent issue of Advanced Science that details this step toward building living windpipe structures from self-assembled modules. Successful trials and further research and development could someday allow surgeons the option of replacing a damaged or faulty trachea with a fully functional natural-tissue trachea in both adults and children, said Eben Alsberg, professor in biomedical engineering and orthopaedic surgery and director of the Alsberg Stem Cell & Engineered Novel Therapeutics (ASCENT) Lab at Case Western Reserve University. Biomedical engineers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and Case Western Reserve University are growing tracheas by coaxing cells to form three distinct tissue types after assembling them into a tube structure-without relying on scaffolding strategies currently being investigated by other groups.

Protein scaffold trachea