Lab-Grown Vaginas Provide Normal Sex Lives for Women With Rare Condition
The work of scientists trying to manufacture major human organs like the brain and heart in the lab has generated a lot of buzz, even though it will most likely be decades before the lab-grown organs are exact enough to be transplanted into patients.
But scientists are already successfully replicating some of the less
intricate parts of the human anatomy. Two such studies led the editors
of The Lancet to trumpet in the most recent issue “Tissue engineering’s green shoots of disruptive innovation.”
The
journal marked two sets of results: In one study, Swiss doctors used
patients’ cells and a structure made of pig collagen to provide healthy
sinus structure in five patients who had lost much of their noses to
skin cancer. In another, Anthony Atala, a pioneer in regenerative medicine,
documented that young women who received custom-fitted vaginal canals
made from scaffolded human cells grown in the lab, saw healthy tissue
grow with their bodies and enjoyed normal sex lives 5-8 years after
their surgeries.
Okay, it’s a little weird to be talking about vaginas here, but
that’s kind of the point. While this work in regenerative medicine lacks
the unembarrassed awe that greets lab-grown hearts and brains, the patients’ quality of life — their ability to have normal sex lives — depends on it.
The young women Atala treated suffered from a rare condition,
Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, in which the vagina, and
sometimes the uterus, is absent. The girls were between 13 and 18 years
old at the time of the surgeries performed in Mexico City between 2005
and 2008. Their subsequent sexual satisfaction was self-reported using a
standard set of criteria.
Currently, women with MRKH syndrome undergo dilation of existing
tissue or grafts of skin or the tissue that lines the abdominal cavity.
But graft shrinkage and infections are common.
“This may represent a new option for patients who require vaginal
reconstructive surgeries. In addition, this study is one more example of
how regenerative medicine strategies can be applied to a variety of
tissues and organs,” Atala said in a statement provided for press.
Though Atala has used stem cells in other processes, in this case,
doctors took a tiny sample of vulvar tissue from each patient and used
it to cultivate smooth muscle cells and vaginal epithelial cells in the
lab. (In other words, they did not first turn the cells into induced
stem cells.)
While
Atala has used 3D printing in some of his treatments, the scaffolds
that gave the tissue its shape were hand-sewn from a decellularised
segment of pig intestine. 3D printing would be needed to bring costs
down if the number of procedures rises.
The structure was surgically attached to the patients’ reproductive
organs. The scaffold gradually biodegraded and the cells expanded and
formed normal vaginal walls.
Atala, whose lab was the first to implant lab-grown organs into human patients, earned TED fame for a talk
in which he showed off a young man who had received a replacement
bladder based on an approach similar to the one used in Mexico City.
Research for the MRHK treatment began in the early 1990s and had already
shown that once cell-seeded scaffolds are implanted in the body, nerves
and blood vessels form and the cells expand and form tissue.
As The Lancet observes, this latest work suggests that many
quality-of-life medical issues might be helped using the lower-tech,
clinic-ready versions of stem cell-inspired therapies.
Images: Wake Forest University
