WIKIMEDIAResearchers at Wake Forest University in North Carolina have designed, built, and implanted vaginas for four women who were born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, in which the organ did not properly develop during embryogenesis. The procedure was successful, according to a report published last week (April 11) in The Lancet, with all patients reporting normal levels of “desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction, and painless intercourse.”
“Really for the first time we’ve created a whole organ that was never there to start with; it was a challenge,” lead researcher Anthony Atala, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest, told BBC News. But, he added to Reuters, “by the six-month time point, you couldn’t tell the difference between engineered organ and the normal organ.”
The researchers scanned the pelvic region of each patient—all of whom were teenagers at the time—to design customized scaffolds, which were then seeded with muscle and vaginal-lining cells grown from a small tissue biopsy of the vulva, which like the vagina, was poorly developed in these patients. The custom organs were then grown in a bioreactor until they were implanted into the patients between 2005 ...
