A group of Bristol scientists, who pioneered the world's first windpipe transplant, are hoping to use similar techniques to replace people's voice boxes.

Professor Anthony Hollander and Professor Martin Birchall, from Bristol University, are part of a pan-European team hoping for six million euros of funding to be able to make larynx transplants a possibility.

But first the ethics and challenges surrounding the procedure will be debated by the Royal College of Surgeons.

Each year about 1,000 patients in the UK will lose their voice box – the larynx – because of cancer or trauma.

The larynx creates and controls sound though muscle and cartilage interacting with the vocal cords.

But when it is removed, in a procedure known as a laryngectomy, the patient is left with a permanent breathing hole in their neck.

The difficulty of restoring the complicated nerve and muscle functions has, to date, been beyond surgery.

The only option to them is to have an artificial voice, either through a vibrating machine they put on their throat, or placing a small device in a permanent breathing hole in their neck which is activated by putting their finger over the hole.

The techniques mean patients are unable to swim, shout and sometimes even smell.

Despite years of research, there has only ever been one voice box transplant in the US, and the patient still needed to breathe through a hole in his neck.

But now improved stem cell technology could provide a breakthough.

Last year, a similar technique led by Bristol scientists, was used on Colombian mother-of-two Claudia Castillo. Disease had caused her windpipe, or trachea, to collapse just at the point where it entered her left lung. Without the pioneering operation the lung would have been removed by surgeons. She was given a donated organ covered with her own stem cells to trick her body into thinking the organ was part of her.

She can now live a normal life without having to take powerful anti-rejection drugs.

The project now looks to transfer the same technique to transplant voice boxes, once funding has been secured and any ethical issues have been resolved.

Professor Birchall said: "We, as a task force, have to ask ourselves whether we are finally entering the right window where a marriage of technology and of need mandates that we can go forward with this procedure.

"Before now, the prevailing view has been that the balance has been strongly in favour of not going ahead.

"But we feel there have been sufficient technological advances to make us seriously revisit the case for developing and making routine this procedure. We have to ask ourselves is it right to subject a patient to the risks of surgery for a procedure which is not life-saving."

Professor Hollander added: "You have to consider, as happened with the first face transplant, how much a voice is part of someone's character and person, does it change them?

If the team receive the go- ahead laboratory work could start this year.