{UAH} Lab-Created Vaginas

Charlotte Lytton

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Tech + Health

04.12.14

Lab-Created Vaginas, Successfully Implanted in Four Women, Function Normally

Four young women born with defective or absent vaginas now have fully functioning parts, thanks to science.

How does your lady-garden grow? In a lab, thanks to amazing new developments in U.S. medicine. Scientists have successfully engineered and implanted vaginas into four women with a rare congenital disorder, all of whom reported normal levels of "desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction and painless intercourse" following the surgery.

One of the women involved, who wished to remain anonymous, said of the treatment:  "Truly I feel very fortunate because I have a normal life, completely normal."

Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina, extended the study to four teenage girls suffering from vaginal aplasia (where the organ has developed either defectively or not at all) as a result of Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome (MRKHS). The condition affects around 1 in 5,000 women. Scans of each patient's pelvis were used to create a biodegradable 3D-scaffold, where cells grown from the existing vulva tissue could be moulded into the right shape, and were kept incubated in an environment similar to the human body during the manufacturing process.

Doctor Anthony Atala, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest, told the BBC that creating functioning vaginas for women who had been born without them was "very important" and "very rewarding." This is thought to be the first instance in which a whole organ has been created entirely from scratch—a process he described as "a challenge." The procedure is currently being tested on more patients at the medical center, with a view to rolling it out on a larger scale in clinical trials in the near future.