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A surgeon saved a child's life, in a surgery that is the first of its kind, as it restored hope for life to a newborn with heart failure, according to what the British newspaper The Times said,
Finley, who is two years old now, is the first child in the world to be injected with "stem cells" into the heart muscles so that damaged blood vessels can grow and continue to pump blood.
This surgery was a last-ditch effort by Massimo Caputo, Professor of Congenital Heart Surgery and Consultant Cardiac Surgeon at the University of Bristol, after many surgeries which failed to save a baby with heart failure.
Caputo is now using the donor's own stem cells to develop "stem cell patches" aimed at repairing abnormalities in the valves of blood vessels and repairing holes between the heart's two main pumping chambers.
Artificial tissues are usually used in children to repair heart defects, but they may fail or be rejected by the host body, and they do not grow with the heart, so when children grow up, they have to perform other operations.
Caputo wants to use a bioprinter to create stem cell patches that help heart tissue repair itself and grow as the child grows so that he does not need open-heart surgery during his life.
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