PHOTOS: Woman born without vagina gets a transplant grown in a laboratory

• Posted on April 22, 2014April 22, 2014
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

The unnamed woman, from Mexico, is one of four women born without a vagina who have been given the new treatment, revealed last week.The organ is engineered using a woman’s own cells

A woman given a vagina grown in a laboratory has spoken of her hope to have a family one day.

She is one of four women born without a vagina who have been given the new treatment, revealed last week.

Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine engineered the organs using the women’s own cells

The new organs have been given to women born with MRKH – Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, a rare genetic condition in which the vagina and uterus are underdeveloped or absent

The new organs have been given to women born with MRKH – Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, a rare genetic condition in which the vagina and uterus are underdeveloped or absent

One of the women, interviewed by New Scientist, credits the procedure with giving her a normal life.

She said: ‘At the beginning it wasn’t easy, thinking that a part of your body was going to be made in a laboratory. It was difficult to understand.

‘But as the years pass and with the good results, you find a way of life which is different but not too far from normality.

‘You start from a point where you are scared of everything, of trying anything – you feel you aren’t normal.

Eight years on, the woman says the organ works ‘as if it weren’t made in the lab’ and her body has accepted it incredibly well

About five to six weeks after the biopsy, surgeons created a canal in the patient’s pelvis and sutured the scaffold to reproductive structures.

Previous research in Dr Atala’s lab has shown that once cell-seeded scaffolds are implanted in the body, nerves and blood vessels form and the cells expand and form tissue.

At the same time the scaffolding material is being absorbed by the body, the cells lay down materials to form a permanent support structure – gradually replacing the engineered scaffold with a new organ.

Follow-up testing on the lab-engineered vaginas showed the margin between native tissue and the engineered segments was indistinguishable.

Yuanyuan Zhang demonstrates the process where four young women born with abnormal or missing vaginas were implanted with lab-grown versions made from their own cells

In addition, the patients’ responses to a Female Sexual Function Index questionnaire showed they had normal sexual function after the treatment, including desire and pain-free intercourse.

“Tissue biopsies, MRI scans and internal exams using magnification all showed that the engineered vaginas were similar in makeup and function to native tissue, said Atlantida-Raya Rivera, lead author and director of the HIMFG Tissue Engineering Laboratory in Mexico City, where the surgeries were performed.

Current treatments for MRHK syndrome include dilation of existing tissue or reconstructive surgery to create new vaginal tissue.

A variety of materials can be used to surgically construct a new vagina – from skin grafts to tissue that lines the abdominal cavity. However, these substitutes often lack a normal muscle layer and some patients can develop a narrowing or contracting of the vagina.

The researchers say that with conventional treatments, the overall complication rate is as high as 75 percent in paediatric patients, with the need for vaginal dilation due to narrowing being the most common complication.

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