Scientists Just Built a Better Vagina in a Laboratory
There's not much to add to the New Scientist's lede here: "Vaginas grown in a lab from the recipients' own cells have been successfully transferred to the body for the first time."
The magazine reports that researchers were doing a solid for four women, ages 13 to 18, who were afflicted with extreme cases of Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome (MKRH) and thus born without vaginal canals. They couldn't have sex or regular menstrual cycles.
But researchers took muscle tissue samples from the women, engineered vaginas from them by leaving the samples "to mature in an incubator in a facility approved for human-tissue manufacturing," according to the scientists' abstract in the Lancet, and then periodically taking the samples out and molding them into vaginal cavities, as shown in the video above.
The vaginas were then surgically implanted in the women by surgeons from a Mexican hospital with no complications. The women have all had their new vaginas for between four and eight years now, and they all experience painless penetrative sex and "normal levels of desire, arousal, satisfaction and orgasm," Wake Forest medical doctor and lead researcher Anthony Atala told the New Statesman.
Two of the women also have working uteruses and appear able to now have children, thanks to the surgery.
How do you top that? Atala's team is now working on a miniature human liver and also reportedly constructed "the first functional anal sphincters" ever made in a lab. So... yeah. Nice job, science.