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Lab Rabbits Get Functional Artificial Penises

Posted on: Tuesday, 10 November 2009, 13:10 CST

Scientists have created artificial penises for rabbits -- using cells from the animals -- that were fully functional and even used to father baby rabbits, Reuters reported.

The researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday that the work moves science even closer to making other complex solid organs such as livers using a patient's own cells.

Dr. Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center's Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who led the study, said the study produced a tailor-made transplant.

He said once the tissue is there, the body recognizes the tissue as its own.

Atala, a pediatric urologist who has specialized for years in disorders and congenital defects of the bladder and sexual organs, said the penis was the inspiration for the study.

“We are seeing babies born with deficient genitalia all the time. There are no good options,” he said.

Atala is also a specialist in regenerative medicine, which uses the body's own cells to repair damage.

For the current study, Atala's team used ordinary cells, not the stem cells often used in such research. Companies such as Geron and privately held Advanced Cell Technology have business models based on such technology.

His team of researchers first created a scaffold using the penis of a rabbit, and removed all the living cells from it, leaving only cartilage. A small piece of tissue from the penis of another rabbit was then used to grow the cells in a lab dish.

The work has taken his team 18 years to complete.

"We had to find the right growth factors, the right soup to grow the cells in," he said.

They used smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells, the same type of cells that line blood vessels. The smooth muscle cells made the organ's spongy tissue and the endothelial cells grew into blood vessels.

Once the cells were seeded onto the scaffold, the researchers had penises six weeks later that were ready to graft onto rabbits that had their penises removed.

Once the 12 rabbits with the grafts realized they had working organs again, they tried to mate with female rabbits within one minute of being put into cages with them, and four of the female rabbits became pregnant.

The test rabbits with the scaffolding alone and no working tissue did not even try to mate.

The researchers hope the procedure will work with people, perhaps starting with adult men who have had damage to their organs, Atala said.

The team wrote in the report that patients with congenital anomalies, penile cancer, traumatic penile injury, and some types of organic erectile dysfunction could benefit from this technology in the future.

Atala said the process takes six weeks and that there is reason to believe a penis grafted onto a baby would grow with the child.

The approach could even work with other organs, as they have made clitoral tissue in the past and they have extensive work going on with kidneys and livers.

The experiments began with replacement bladders grown from patients' cells. Atala said that patients fitted with artificial bladders have been enjoying good function for 10 years now.

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On the Net:

• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Wake Forest University Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Source: RedOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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