One Blog for the Kids!: Stockholm

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Monday, December 19, 2011

First artificial windpipe graft a success

Posted: 24 November 2011

PARIS: The word's first artificial windpipe transplant has been such a success that a second operation has been carried out and a third is being planned, The Lancet reported on Thursday.

Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene, a 36-year-old Eritrean, is doing well after undergoing the ground-breaking operation in Stockholm in June, it said.

Beyene, a post-graduate geology student currently living in Reykjavik, Iceland, had his trachea removed because of cancer.

It was replaced in a 12-hour operation on June 9 with a synthetic "scaffold" covered with his own stem cells, or precursor cells of windpipe tissue.

"The patient has been doing great for the last four months and has been able to live a normal life," the British journal quoted Tomas Gudbjartsson, a professor at Landspitali University Hospital and University of Iceland in Reykjavik, as saying.

"For the last two months he has been able to focus on his studies and the plan is that he will defend his thesis at the end of this year."

The operation, led by Professor Paolo Macchiarini of Stockholm's Karolinska University Hospital, entailed using 3-D imaging to scan Beyene and then building a glass model of the afflicted section of his windpipe.

The glass was used to shape the artificial scaffold, which was then seeded with stem cells.

Macchiarini has just carried out his second transplant, on a 30-year-old man from Maryland, United States, who also had cancer of the trachea. The scaffold was made from nanofibres and thus "represents a further advance," the Journal quoted Macchiarini as saying.

His team is now hoping to treat a 13-month-old South Korean infant with the same technique.

"We will continue to improve the regenerative medicine approaches for transplanting the windpipe and extend it to the lungs, heart, and oesophagus," said Macchiarini.

It marks a step forward in regenerative medicine, as the organ is tailor-made to the patient, he said.

In addition, artificial organs do not require the long waiting time that usually happens in human donation.

As the stem cells come from the patient himself, this reduces risk of attack by the immune system, which is the case for donated organs whose rejection has to be combatted by taking powerful immunosuppressive drugs.

-AFP/pn

Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
First artificial windpipe graft a success

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Ancient ships discovered at sea bottom

Image via Wikipedia

Centuries-old shipwrecks discovered in Baltic Sea
09-March-2010 11:31 PM

STOCKHOLM - A dozen centuries-old shipwrecks some of them unusually well-preserved have been found in the Baltic Sea by a gas company building an underwater pipeline between Russia and Germany.

The oldest wreck probably dates back to medieval times and could be up to 800 years old, while the others are likely from the 17th to 19th centuries, Peter Norman of Sweden's National Heritage Board said Tuesday.

"They could be interesting, but we have only seen pictures of their exterior. Many of them are considered to be fully intact. They look very well-preserved," Norman told The Associated Press.

Thousands of wrecks from medieval ships to warships sunk during the world wars of the 20th century have been found in the Baltic Sea, which doesn't have the ship worm that destroys wooden wrecks in saltier oceans.

The latest discovery was made during a search of the seabed east of the Swedish island of Gotland by the Nord Stream consortium, which is building a 750-mile (1,200-kilometer) pipeline in the Baltic Sea.

The 12 wrecks were found in a 30-mile-long and 2-mile-wide (48-kilometer-long and 1.2 kilometer-wide) corridor, Nord Stream spokeswoman Tora Leifland Holmstrom said.

The heritage board said three of the wrecks have intact hulls and are lying upside-down at a depth of 430 feet (130 meters).

Swedish marine archaeology experts analyzed pictures of the wrecks and determined that they could be of a high historic value.

"The content can tell us a lot about everyday life during that time," Norman said.

It's unclear whether any of them will be salvaged but the board said it hopes they will be explored by divers though Norman added many of them are at a depth that would require very advanced and costly diving operations.

The Nord Stream consortium, which plans to start construction in April, has promised to make sure its activities don't damage the wrecks. The area where they were found is in Sweden's economic zone, but not in the planned route of the pipeline, Leifland Holmstrom said.

The Nord Stream project, in which Russia's OAO Gazprom holds a 51 percent stake, has uncovered scores of other objects during seabed searches of the route, including about 80 sea mines and a washing machine, she said.

Last year, parts of a 300-year-old ship were salvaged from Germany's Bay of Greifswald to clear a path for the pipeline, which expects to carry some 1.9 trillion cubic feet (55 billion cubic meters) of natural gas a year.

Sweden's most famous maritime discovery, the royal warship Vasa, is housed in a popular museum in Stockholm where visitors can admire the ship's details, down to the flashing teeth of the carved lions that adorn its elaborate exterior. The Vasa was raised from the Stockholm harbor in 1961, 333 years after it sank on its maiden voyage. - AP

From GMANews.tv; see the source article here.
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Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Long-lost World War II sub found off Swedish coast

Image via Wikipedia

Talk about history, and this is one "living" proof of what happened in the past…

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June 9, 2009 -- Updated 2203 GMT (0603 HKT)

Story Highlights

Lighthouse watchman last saw it 69 years ago before it sank near island of Market

The Soviet submarine S-2 had a crew of 46 and four passengers when it sank

Remains found between Swedish coast and Finnish island of Aland in February

Sweden and Finland claim credit for sinking the submarine with mines

A team of Swedish and Finnish divers had been searching for the Soviet submarine S-2 since 1999.

(CNN) -- Lighthouse keeper J.A. Eckerman was the last person to see World War II Soviet submarine S-2 before it sank in January 1940 between Sweden and Finland.

As the submarine dove near the island of Market, northwest of Aland, Eckerman heard a loud explosion and saw smoke rise from the water.

The long-lost wreck was missing for 69 years until a team of Swedish and Finnish divers -- including Eckerman's grandson Ingvald -- discovered it this year.

What remains of the sub was found between the Swedish coast and the Finnish island of Aland, northeast of Stockholm, in late February, the divers announced Tuesday.

The submarine was very badly damaged by the explosion, said Marten Zetterstrom, one of the divers. The front gun is still there, and a torpedo is still in one of the tubes, but about 20 meters (about 65 feet) of the vessel is missing.

The search had been going on for nearly 10 years, the divers said in a news release.

The sub had a crew of 46 and four passengers when it sank.

Sweden and Finland claim credit for sinking the submarine with mines. Russia has contacted Swedish and Finnish authorities to clarify what caused the submarine to sink, the divers said.

Finland was at war with the Soviet Union at the time the sub sank. A deal between Germany and the Soviets had put the Nordic nation within the Soviet "sphere of influence," and Soviet troops had invaded Finland late in 1939.

The fighting was mostly confined to Finland's eastern border. Just two months after the submarine's sinking, a temporary peace agreement was reached.

Sweden remained neutral in World War II.

From CNN.com; see the source article here.