New Medical Breakthrough: Body Part Created

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This article describes Wake Forest’s successful tissue engineering research, used to recreate damaged tissue in the urethra of males.  After successfully engineering urethral tissue, researchers have started the process of tissue engineering ears, which has, so far, been successful with animals.   On top of that, researchers in the same lab are working on engineering muscle as well.

When growing urethral tissue, researchers would take a scraping of cells from inside the bladder.  The harvested cells were then grown into full tissue over urethra mesh scaffolds made of polyester by being distributed throughout the inside of the scaffold.  After this, the tissue was allowed to develop for several weeks before being implanted.  So far, 5 boys have been treated with engineered urethral tissue.  For recreating ears, researchers have been using a 3D printer to recreate the structure of an ear.  CT scans generate a structure pattern that researchers can replicate, generating the structure layer by layer.  Lastly, researchers have begun growing muscle tissue by taking biopsies and culturing the muscle tissue on an implanted scaffold, different from the urethral tissue engineering in how it grows in vitro.  The muscle growing is really fascinating because they implant a bioreactor in with the growing tissue and its scaffold so that the tissue gets exercise while growing.

Overall, I chose this article because I am interested in tissue engineering and the benefits it presents for future medical practices.  Even though I have heard of labs engineering tissue experimentally, this was the first time I had heard of a large scale tissue engineering endeavor being already put into practice (the urethral tissue regrowth).  I’m excited to see what can be grown and applied to the body in the future, hoping that eventually damaged nerve tissue will be able to be engineered.