Ben has some options for repairing his Esophageal Atresia. We are researching two.
[i] Clinical Guidelines (Nursing) Replogle tube management The Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne AU http://www.rch.org.au/rchcpg/hospital_clinical_guideline_index/Replogle_Tube_Management/
Lab-Grown Esophagus Could Aid Cancer Patients By Jesse Emspak, Live Science Contributor | April 15, 2014 02:23pm ET
[Lab-Grown Esophagus Could Aid Cancer Patients]
Researchers have grown an esophagus in a lab.
Doctors have implanted bio-engineered tracheas in patients, and researchers have experimented with growing bladders and kidneys. Now, another organ joins that list: the esophagus, which brings food and water to the stomach.
An international team of scientists working at Kuban State Medical University in Krasnodar, Russia, has built a working esophagus from stem cells, and implanted the organ into rats, the researchers say. The new esophagus functioned just as well as the rats' natural organs, said the researchers, who detailed their work today (April 15) in the journal Nature Communications.
Although this technique for building an esophagus seems to work in rats, there is still a long way to go before it could be tested in people. Differences between rats and humans could complicate the translation. For example, rat and human esophagi don't have exactly the same types of muscles and structure.
There's also the question of whether growing an esophagus could be scaled up, as a rat esophagus is much smaller than a person's.
In the next steps, Macchiarini said, researchers will need to move to experiments in larger animals, as well as with other organs, to see if the concept they tried in this study is broadly applicable.