Breakthrough in Quest to Grow Body Parts

Lab-Made Vaginas Transplanted Into Patients Whose Own Were Absent Due to Rare Disease

Scientists have successfully transplanted laboratory-made vaginas into four teenage girls whose own were absent because of a rare disease, marking a milestone in the quest to grow structurally complex body parts.

The experiment was published Thursday in the journal Lancet along with another study, in which a separate group of researchers transplanted lab-made nostrils into patients whose noses were damaged by cancer.

The vaginas were created from the patients' own cells and implanted between 2005 and 2008. Today, the women report normal sexual function.

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Dr. Atala began the effort to make a lab-grown vagina in the late 1990s to address disorders that cause some girls to be born without normal vaginas. Cancer and trauma can also lead to vaginal damage or loss. Currently, doctors reconstruct the vagina using a patient's own skin or part of the intestine, but both cause other physical problems.

The effort immediately hit a roadblock: "We couldn't even get the vaginal mucosal cells to grow outside the body," Dr. Atala recalled. After solving that problem, the team needed to find something to serve as a scaffold—or skeleton—on which the cells would sit. They rejected various options, including the material used to make surgical sutures, before settling on one they liked: tissue from a pig's intestine.

The pig tissue was first bathed in detergent, which removed the original cells and left behind a scaffold-like structure made from collagen. This was coated on one side with epithelial cells, which line the body's cavities, and which had been obtained via a biopsy of the patient's external genitals. The other side was coated with smooth muscle cells, also from the patient. When the scaffold was placed in an incubator and nourished with chemicals and oxygen, the cells began to grow.

The scaffold was hand-sewn into a vagina-like shape and tailored to fit the patient. Surgeons created a cavity in the patient's pelvis and sutured the cell-populated scaffold to reproductive structures, including the uterus.

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