SKIRMISHER

Women with the Mayer-von Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, or MRKHS for short, have every reproductive equipment normal women have, except a working, healthy vagina.

Surgeons usually correct the condition by reconstructing a vagina out of grafted skin or from intestinal tissue. But Italian doctor Cinzia Marchese of University Sapienza in Rome managed to grow healthy vaginas by growing them in the lab.

“What we do is to take a little biopsy of 0.5 centimetres from the place the vagina should be,” Marchese says.

The researchers then used an enzyme to break down the tissue and let the immature cells, called stem cells, generate new, mucosal tissue on their own.

It takes about 15 days to get a thick enough layer to transplant into the patients, Marchese says.

Marchese studied using stem cells to build sheets of skin in vitro to provide skin grafts for burn victims at Harvard Medical School with the technique’s pioneer Professor Howard Green.

“When I came back to Italy I modified this technique for mucosal vagina tissue,” she says, adding that its success could be good news for women with cancer and other vaginal complaints.

Stumble it!