Jaw Dropping

Scientists and doctors in Finland were able to reconstruct a man's jaw using his own stem cells. It's a process that holds great promise:

The team used no materials from animals - preventing the risk of transmitting viruses than can be hidden in an animal's DNA, and followed European Union guidelines, she said.

Stem cells are the body's master cells and they can be found throughout the blood and tissues. Researchers have recently found that fat contains stem cells which can be manipulated so that they form a variety of different tissues.

Using a patient's own stem cells provides a tailor-made transplant that the body should not reject.

Suuronen and her colleagues - the project was run jointly with the Helsinki University Central Hospital - isolated stem cells from the patient's fat and grew them for two weeks in a specially formulated nutritious soup that included the patient's own blood serum.

In this case they identified and pulled out cells called mesenchymal stem cells - immature cells than can give rise to bone, muscle or blood vessels.

When they had enough cells to work with, they attached them to a scaffold made out of a calcium phosphate biomaterial and then put it inside the patient's abdomen to grow for nine months. The cells turned into a variety of tissues and even produced blood vessels, the researchers said.

The block was later transplanted into the patient's head and connected to the skull bone using screws and microsurgery to connect arteries and veins to the vessels of the neck.

The patient's upper jaw had previously been removed because of a benign tumor, and he was unable to eat or speak without the use of a removable prosthesis.