Petri Dish Grown Womb

Lab-grown womb allowed for the full growth of an offspring in the mother’s organism. Well, so far it works only in animals but one day it could allow a woman who cannot carry their own child.

Image by Raman Oza from Pixabay

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Tissue engineering has many successes behind it. People with lab-grown blood vessels, bladders, bronchi, etc. organs are walking the world. Growing tissue and organs outside of the healing organism is one of the possible solutions for the lack of viable donors for transplants. You can use the patient's own cells and thus deal with the immune barrier.

But growing a full-grown organ with its complicated inner structure is not easy. Now, a team led by Anthony Atala from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine – one of the best teams in their field – published a study about how they grew an artificial womb.

Organ Grown On Polymer

Anthony Atala and his coworkers used “a scaffolding” made from a 3D network of a bio-degradable polymer. This polymer was formed into the shape of a real rabbit womb and then they implanted cells from real rabbit wombs. The cells multiplied, grew through the 3D polymer network, and slowly degraded it. As they continued, the “scaffolding” slowly changed into living womb-tissue. After it finished growing they implanted into the females instead of the original organ.

But that wasn’t the real test. That happened when their females mated with males. One-fourth of them got pregnant and three-quarters of them gave birth to healthy offspring. Though, in all the cases only one young rabbit was born which pales in comparison to healthy rabbits.

The healthy rabbit female got all pregnant and on average had four babies. Yet, the experiment is considered to be a breakthrough because it shows that a lab-grown womb is capable of handling the full-growth of an offspring.

Ethical Questions

Atala thinks that a lab-grown human womb will allow to carry children even if they have a defective womb. Currently, these women are forced to get a womb from a donor and this is a dangerous operation and the recipient must use immunosuppressants.

A womb transplant is the only transplant that is temporary. After a successful pregnancy, the womb is taking away from the recipient. Another option is a “mother for rent”. A woman that will have an embryo of another pair implanted and carry it until birth. Usually for a nice financial compensation.

Sources:

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-0547-7

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