Samuel, who is about to undergo ear reconstruction surgery. New technology could help children like Samuel, 15, who has had ear reconstruction surgery, which involves cutting out costal cartilage.
According to foreign media reports, doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London are working on extracting stem cells from fat to reconstruct human facial organs. The research team has grown cartilage tissue in the lab and believes it could be used to recreate parts such as ears and noses. The findings on this technique were published in the journal Nanomedicine.
Researchers say the technology will be a revolutionary treatment. Industry experts believe the technology still has a long way to go, but has a lot of potential. Researchers hope to use this method to treat diseases such as congenital microtia (microtia). The current treatment for microtia is to cut cartilage from the child's rib and then create the normal shape of the pinna. Such treatments require multiple surgeries and can leave permanent scars on the child's chest, and the costal cartilages do not fully recover.
In the study, doctors removed a small piece of fat from a child and extracted stem cells from it to grow. An auricle-shaped "scaffold" is placed into the stem cell culture so that the stem cells will grow in the shape and structure that people want. Chemicals added to the culture medium prompt the stem cells to transform into chondrocytes. These chondrocytes can be implanted under a child's skin to become a new ear. So far, researchers have successfully grown cartilage tissue, but it has to be tested for safety before it can be used in patients.
Patrizia Ferretti, Ph.D., the researcher, said: "It was very exciting to get these cells that were not derived from the tumor, which were used in the same patient, so there was no problem of immunosuppression. We hope to do the entire procedure in one operation, which will greatly reduce the stress on the child, and hopefully the structure will continue to grow as the child grows."
For the study, UCL surgeon Professor Martin Bochar pointed out that stem cells derived from fat still need more safety testing. "We use bone marrow stem cells because more than 10,000 people have had successful bone marrow transplants," he said. "Adipose stem cells may also be safe, but they have a poor safety record at the moment." (Ren Tian)
