Historical operation at OSF gives Korean toddler a new life
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- Published on Tuesday, 30 April 2013 16:15
- Written by Paul Gordon
A little girl tasted a lollipop last Friday. It was her first taste of a treat most children take for granted.
For 2½-year-old Hannah Warren, that taste was made possible by an historical operation performed in Peoria on April 19 at the Children's Hospital of Illinois. In short, she was given a tissue-engineered, bioartificial windpipe in an operation that was the first of its kind in the world to be performed on a child.
The surgery gave Hannah the trachea she has lacked since her birth in Seoul, South Korea. She suffered from tracheal agenesis, where the trachea failed to develop, and a transplant was the only way she could live a normal life or even survive.
The trachea implanted in the child was constructed using her own stem cells and it will enable her to live as normal a life as possible, said surgeons who performed the operation.
(Photo courtesy of Children's Hospital of Illinois) Hannah Warren smiles without a tube in her mouth and leading to her lungs for the first time in her young life after groundbreaking surgery performed April 19 in Peoria. Her parents, Darryl and Young-Mi Warren, brought to child from Seoul, South Korea, where she was born without a trachea, for the operation. That included Peoria pediatric surgeon Dr. Mark Holterman, who first met Hannah when she was but a month old and has been working ever since to help the child born with a normally fatal condition. He was in Seoul on a business trip and was asked to visit with Hannah and her parents— father Darryl, who is Canadian, and mother Young-Mi, who is Korean.
"I came back to Peoria trying to figure out how to fix her. We often find a birth defect there is no solution for, but if we can use our own natural cells we can have a chance to find a way to fix it," Holterman said.
He called in Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, professor of regenerative surgery at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who had created new trachea for adults affected by cancer or other disease. Together they worked to build one for Hannah from "non-absorbable nanofibers and stem cells from her own bone marrow," hospital officials said during a news conference Tuesday at OSF HealthCare in Peoria and broadcast around the world.
Hannah was brought to Peoria March 29 with her family and the nine-hour operation was performed April 19. It included opening the child's neck, chest and abdomen to insert the three-inch trachea and open paths to her lungs and stomach, said Dr. Richard Pearl, surgeon-in-chief at Children's Hospital as well as professor of surgery and pediatrics at University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria.
"The post-op course has gone relatively well," Pearl said, noting the child underwent the equivalent of three major operations, something that would cause substantial surgical stress and require significant rehabilitation. But he also noted that because the trachea was made using her own stem cells and no donated organs, this procedure "virtually eliminates the chance of rejection by her immune system."
Pearl reminded the news conference audience that because of her condition Hannah has never been able to breath on her own, or even eat; tubes and machines have done it for her. "She has to learn to do things for the first time," he said.
(Photo courtesy of Children Hospital of Illinois) Dr. Mark Holterman, the pediatric surgeon whose efforts resulted in toddler Hannah Warren receiving a bioartificial trachea built using her own stem cells, holds the child shortly after she arrived in Peoria March 29. The survey was performed April 19.Macchiarini termed the procedure "a miracle" because of Hannah's age. He praised the Children's Hospital of Illinois and its personnel as "world-class and incredibly dedicated to saving children."
He further praised OSF HealthCare for waiving the costs of the expensive procedure but for allowing it to be done at the Children's Hospital, which is part of OSF-Saint Francis Medical Center. Permission came after the Peoria Diocese determined that since them stem cells would be from Hannah herself the procedure would not violate Catholic moral directives regarding stem cell research.
Without OSF waiving the costs the family would not have been able to afford the groundbreaking surgery.
"What a wonderful gift of this hospital. They made the choice to save the life of this child," Macchiarini said. "I cannot express enough what this means to me as a scientist, a man and a father. If we can do something to save just one simple life, that of a child especially, it is worth all the money in the world."
