Lab-made organ implanted for first time

For the first time, a patient has received a synthetic windpipe that was created in a lab with the patient's own stem cells and without using human donor tissue.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/07/07...ea.transplant/

... okay, and ?

hair follicles are organs... you catch the drift here

its a bit trivial to do a wind pipe compared to a follicle.

windpipe is just a pipe made of tissue.

you get a wind pipe from an animal, wash out the cells so that only the protein made scaffold remains, then you culture stem cells on this scaffold, and result is, living human compatible wind pipe.

nothing magical in that. no cycling, no signaling no nothing required. you dont even care much if the correct cells grow on the pipe or not, as long as the wind flows through, its fine. it doesnt have to be exactly the same type of tissue as original wind pipe.

Well I for one think this is pretty amazing...

Debris: You're talking like this would just be dead tissue, but it is not. There is tons of signalling going on, otherwise the cells would atrophy and die. The signalling also has to be regulated or there might be tumorous growths.

[sigh] Time marches on and the cure for baldness remains elusive despite all the advances in medical science.