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Laboratory-grown vaginas implanted in patients
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- rjknight 13y agoOr robots with penises. Paging Pintsize[1]... [1] http://questionablecontent.wikia.com/wiki/Pintsize http://questionablecontent.wikia.com/wiki/Pintsize EDIT: well, now this makes no sense. The parent comment basically asked whether or not lab-grown penises might exist, and what uses may be found for them.
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- pekk 13y agoIt is useless unless a person receives the implant. It's not useful on its own. To solve that problem, there are already masturbation products on the market made out of synthetic materials. Half of humanity already has vaginas. The sex industry already has hold of people with vaginas, it's just not legal most places. However, maybe this changes something in the market for sex reassignment surgeries.
- simsicon 13y agolol the comment by cam44 in the post.
- 51Cards 13y agoSex industry jokes aside it has been amazing to watch this field of research advance. While still limited to relatively simple structures (tracheas, vaginas, cartilage, etc.) this is helping actual patients now, not just lab demos. Imagine when we can grow a new eye, kidney, lung, or heart. I love what our industry does with technology but to me it still pales in comparison with things like bio-engineering. Perhaps that's just my perspective. EDIT: Attaching a bit of a personal outlook. I am about a month away from having a tumor removed and the primary surgery doesn't bother me as much as the reconstruction process that will be required after. Having my own tissues grown to fill in the hole would definitely change my perspective.
- trhway 13y ago> Imagine when we can grow a new eye, kidney, lung, or heart. Imagine that we can grow _better_ eye, kidney, ... extra eye, kidney...
- jksmith 13y agoHuge ramifications for religion. Thinking of Mark 8:22. To know God, you must become... We have to be ok with this at some point.
- mangeletti 13y agoWho's Mark 8? Also, which God? Are you talking about a specific novel or just general gnosticism or mythology?
- jksmith 13y agoThat's a bible verse describing Jesus making a blind man see. Point is, knowing God better is apparently of value to religious Jews and Christians. Biblical study can serve this effort. If it (knowing God) really is important to believers, then they have to consider how science plays a role in that effort as well, except that what science offers may not be nearly as satisfying in a traditional religious sense.
- Pitarou 13y agoI'm curious to know whether this could be offered to M->F transsexuals.
- Kabacaru 13y agoI think this technology might be even more useful for trans men, where unlike trans women there's less flesh available to sculpt the structures you want.
- bostonpete 13y agoWhy would a trans man want a laboratory grown vagina?
- Kabacaru 13y agoThey wouldn't but they might want a laboratory grown penis. There's a lot less skin down their for them to create a penis with currently, so this technology could give surgeons a lot more to work with.
- peterwwillis 13y agoUsing skin grafts and prosthetics they can already create the structures they want, so this would merely make a slightly more realistic looking structure, but probably not make it 'functional'. There's a number of active processes that would have to be reproduced, and I doubt there's sufficient existing wiring/processes in place to create the same effects. If you just don't have the wiring, it's difficult to make it work organically. But I can completely believe it will be possible in the future to create synthetic pumps to induce erection, and redirecting female ejaculation through the phallus should be simple enough.
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- neona 13y agoI don't feel like finding the source, but iirc one of the articles covering this mentioned that they actually managed to grow a penis before they did vaginas, so that is indeed very good news for transmen. Whether it's been actually attached to someone successfully is a different question of course..
- tokenadult 13y agoThe journal The Lancet, which published the peer-reviewed case report[1] on the latest news commented on in the submission here, makes available the full text of a commentary article from 2011[2] about the work of the same doctor, who has worked on several kinds of replacement human organs. My alma mater university is one of several centers around the world of research on growing human tissues on spatial matrices of various kinds to grow replacement organ parts (e.g., heart valves) or organs (e.g., tracheae).[3] I had the pleasure of touring one of the labs here with one of my children, and the researchers in the lab said the research involves experimenting with different materials to form the matrix on which the human cells grow, and of course learning what three-dimensional form of the matrix will produce the best replacement part, with plenty of other issues to research besides. This path of research is one of the reasons why I think it is quite plausible that incremental improvements in life expectancy at middle age and old age, which have been steady throughout my lifetime,[4] will continue as each reader of Hacker News reaches middle age and old age. [1] Abstract of "Tissue-engineered autologous vaginal organs in patients: a pilot cohort study" http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60542-0/abstract http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... [2] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(11)61600-0/fulltext http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... [3] http://www1.umn.edu/news/news-releases/2010/UR_CONTENT_176803.html http://www1.umn.edu/news/news-releases/2010/UR_CONTENT_17680... [4] http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.... http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...
- graeham 13y agoThe work behind this is the result of a huge effort, starting 20-30 years ago. Some people had given up on the promise of tissue engineering - one of my mentors suggested just over a year ago to me that the field was a poor choice to start a career in due to too many researchers and not enough progress. Its a very active field of research, and practically every university with a life sciences or bioengineering department will be doing some sort of work on it. Thanks for posting the journal links. We're not done yet. Most of the currently feasible organs are relatively simple in geometry and homogenety. More complex organs like the kidneys, liver, and espessially brain are probably exponentially harder to make. I personally think we'll have nanotechnologies and regenerative techniques that will leap-frog lab-grown organs before we are making more complex organs (which will be the desired approach unless, as in these cases, the organ is absent). A major disadvantage of lab-grown organs is they still need major surgery to implant. I also think we will soon find (if we haven't already) that the limit on human lifetime and quality is from diet and excercise, and that these approaches get much more gains per dollar. We will soon find (if we haven't already) that health is limited by resources, not science. Prevention before intervention. (PhD student in Bioengineering. I don't work in tissue engineering but most of the people in my office do.)
- hyp0 13y agoWhile an artifical ear or eye has practical benefits, genitials might mean more to the recipients. Hard to tell: which would you rather go without? It mentions that nerves grew into the structure, but doesn't explicitly state how well feeling was restored. Restoring the related organs, uterus, fallopian tubes and especially the eggs themselves, still seems like science-fiction - at least, for now.
- astrieanna 13y agoConsidering that the 4 patients were teenage girls born without vaginas, it seems unlikely that they'd be able to tell how it compares to non-artificial one. Maybe that would be included in another study, on using it as a replacement (after injury/cancer).
- GeneralMayhem 13y agoYes, but at least now it's two-weeks-into-the-future science fiction, not Star Wars science fiction.
- ijk 13y agoThere's a cultural bias against medical treatment for stuff that is less visible or critical. There's a general consensus that things like eyes or legs are useful, even though surveys of paraplegic patients report that partial restoration of genital sensation is more meaningful to them than walking. Fewer people think about less obvious senses like _tasting_ and _smelling_, to the point that it can be difficult to get the condition taken seriously, even though complete loss of smell can be highly traumatic.
- anon4 13y agoThere is a class of people who regard humans (including themselves) as highly advanced and complex robots which slot neatly into worker roles in society, defined by their objective utility. Such a view basically means things that you don't need to function are frivolties and spending resources towards guaranteeing the personal joy of people is an anathema. It kind of seriously makes me consider the "philosophical zombie" hypothesis.
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- brianbreslin 13y agoDo you think we'll start seeing people with bad livers/kidneys/organs pre-ordering new ones and having them frozen/stored? if i'm some rich 80 year old tycoon with a bum heart, i could see myself having new versions of all my parts stored for me at a lab for when i need them.
- anon4 13y agoThen other parts of your body would start failing in interesting ways. Interesting from a scientific perspective, but I'd imagine pretty horrible from a human one. Your heart and kidneys don't fail by themselves, your entire body suffers cumulative damage from mistreatment and it's just those parts that fail in a terminal way first.
- dragonwriter 13y agoWell, once we can solve the problem of the first things to fail, we can work on solving the problem of the next set of things that fail, etc.
- Retric 13y agoI wonder how far you need to go before a brain transplant is cheaper / safer than replacing it. I can see replacing major veins as being doable but capillary's are far less so.
- orthecreedence 13y agoOr perhaps, when our time comes, we can simply die, leaving the world to the next generation as it has been for billions of years.
- dragonwriter 13y agoSure, we can; but if we'd thought that way before we would never have developed medicine. For some reason in every generation there are people who seem to think that using the medical science they are familiar with (or just slightly less) is okay and normal, but using anything more is somehow contrary to nature. But using our mind to develop new ways to overcome the limitations of our bodies is our nature just as much as the failures of our bodies are.
- Shinkei 13y agoPhysician here. I read this paper when it was posted on Reddit a few days ago and it was very impressive. I'll link to the discussion because the top comment was comprehensive and summarizes the published article: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/22qhob/laboratorygrown_vaginas_implanted_in_patients/ http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/22qhob/laboratorygr... To address questions of how this can be applied to other organs, growing tissue like a trachea or skin is becoming easier. They grow the cells on a scaffold and then you have a tissue. Organs are much more complex and a penis is an organ. We are not at that level of sophistication to grow an entire, functional organ ex-vivo, at least for human use.
- travoltaj 13y agoDo you have any insight into what would be the effect of this on Sex Reassignment Surgeries?
- Shinkei 13y agoI wish I did. It's by no means an area of expertise for me, but I would guess that this technique is extremely expensive and will remain limited--at least for the short term--to use in cases of genetic females that require replacement of their vagina due to its congenital absence of loss from cancer/injury. The location of blood vessels, nerves, etc. is different in genetic male vs. female and may require a totally different approach.
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- Fomite 13y agoUnfortunately, limited for now. The implantation was done in patients who have most of the "infrastructure" already in place, rather than the somewhat more dramatic restructuring required for sex reassignment surgery. But it is a very promising first step.
- undoware 13y agoAs a trans woman, I'm very happy about this sort of advance, but I question why I'm seeing it at the top of my HN feed. A lot of people here seem to REALLY LIKE vaginas. Just saying.
- anon4 13y agoWhat kind of person doesn't like vaginas? Except gay men, except those of them that do like vaginas in the aesthetic sense. It would be like not liking breasts or abs or butts or legs or penises. I mean, you don't need to like them sexually, it's just that, well, they're nice to look at.
- quiesce 13y agoQuite a few gay-identifying men go out of their way to make sure you know how disgusting female genitalia are to them.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoI'm bi, and I think both sets of genitals look pretty ridiculous when not seen through the lens of arousal. The rest of the body I can generally appreciate aesthetically, but genitals are just weird.
- arbitrage 13y agoIs it that unexpected that hackers enjoy reading stories about breakthrough medical hacks? This is pretty amazing.
- logfromblammo 13y agoNo. It is not amazing. This is a natural and expected progression of bioengineering technology, and rather easily understood. More complex organs will require either decellularized donor organs or volume-printed extracellular matrix scaffolds, combined with induced pluripotence in autologous donor cells. It will be a while before it becomes cheap enough for hobbyist hacking, but have no doubt that someone visiting this site right now will be biohacking on himself or herself in the future. I'm guessing magnetite organelles injected by syringe into the palms and fingertips would be a popular first mod.
- frozenport 13y agoFun Fact: Laboratory-grown babies implanted in patients happened decades ago.
- ChristianMarks 13y agoI want one.