Where others failed, sometimes spectacularly, French surgeon Emmanuel Martinod has helped people whose windpipes have been ravaged by cancer and other diseases to live and breathe normally again.
At least one of his patients, sporting a new trachea, has taken up long-distance running.
Since 2009, Martinod and his team at Avicenne Hospital near Paris have carried out more than a dozen trachea transplants using donor aortas reinforced with custom-made internal scaffolding, called stents.
Hailed by one US throat surgeon as a “major advance”, the reconstructive technique was detailed Sunday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and presented at a medical congress in San Diego, California.
Previous efforts to rebuild the windpipe and airways from scratch had focused on using artificial tubes…
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