BABY BREAKTHROUGH

Why Immaculate Conception could become real

GROWING a baby outside the human body has come a step closer, courtesy of an Australian scientific breakthrough.

University of Newcastle researcher Minoo Heidari Kani has generated a piece of uterine tissue in a Petri dish, a key step in the process of eventually creating an entire uterus.

The myometrium tissue she has produced is the smooth muscle component of the uterus that has the function of causing uterine contractions in labour.

Human tissue donated by women undergoing caesarean section was de-cellularised, then re-cellularised using the patient’s primary cells and kept in a culture in the researcher’s PhD study.

The tissue was then tested to see if it would contract as a normal uterus would.

While the tissue won’t completely contract yet, Ms Heidari Kani said the concept of growing the tissue in this way had been proved and she was work- ing on improvements. The biomedical engineer said the tissue could be used to repair a damaged uterus or in the laboratory as a model to better understand pregnancy.

It could also be used to test drugs for use during labour.

The goal was to make a whole uterus that could be transplanted, she said.

Before the tissue can be implanted in the human body it will have to be tested in animals to see if it generates an immune response, which could cause problems.

Its first uses would be in cancer or dealing with scar tissue left by caesarean sections, Ms Heidari Kani said.

“You could replace scar tissue with man-made tissue and if there was no scar the next birth could be natural,” Ms Heidari Kani said.

The first piece of uterine tissue grown in the Petri dish is very small, just 1cm, and the next step is to grow a larger piece of around 5cm. Further research will be done into growing the other type of uterine tissue, the endometrium — the mucous membrane that lines the inside of the uterus and is shed during menstrual bleeding.

Ms Heidari Kani said she used microgels, nanofibres and other fibres to try to make a structure and pattern similar to the human body but eventually settled on using actual human tissue because it already had the 3D structure and pattern required to grow healthy cells.

Earlier this year, scientists at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia kept alive extremely premature lambs in an artificial uterus for four weeks.

Their system used a fluidfilled plastic bag and connected oxygenator devices to the umbilical cords of the developing lamb and used the animals’ own heartbeats to drive the collection of oxygen from the device.

The lambs developed normally and some were alive a year after the experiment.