Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old woman living in Barcelona, was the first person in the world to receive a full trachea (or wind pipe) organ transplant grown entirely from her own stem cells.

One other person in 2005 received a similar transplant, except that person had a combination of donor tissue and their own flesh.

Castillo's surgery meant that she never had to go through immunosuppressive therapy or live with the risk that her body would reject the organ and attack it as a disease.

According to the AP, only a handful of trachea transplants have been done.

Castillo had suffered from tuberculosis for years and lost her wind pipe after complications from a severe collapse of her lung.

"This technique has great promise," Dr. Eric Genden, who did a similar transplant in 2005 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York that used both donor and recipient tissue, told the AP.

The technique regrew Castillo's windpipe over the frame of a donor windpipe using bone marrow stem cells collected from her hip.

"They have created a functional, biological structure that can't be rejected," Dr. Allan Kirk of the American Society of Transplantation told the AP. "It's an important advance, but constructing an entire organ is still a long way off."

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/YearInReview/Story?id=6512364&page=3