A team of doctors at Great Ormond Hospital in London are making serious plans to reconstruct an ear with stem cells taken from their patient’s fat. They have already succeeded in growing cartilage in their laboratory and plan to proceed using a technique published in the journal Nanomedicine.
According to James Gallagher, writing for the BBC Health News, the doctors want to treat conditions like microtia, a situation where an ear fails to develop properly, is malformed or is missing altogether.
Microtia is presently treated by physicians taking cartilage from a child’s ribs, sculpting it to make it resemble an ear and implanting it back into the child. The method is far from satisfactory as it requires multiple operations, leaves permanent scarring on the chest and the rib cartilage is said to never fully recover.
The team planning to reconstruct an ear using stem cells intends to take a tiny sample of fat from the child and extract stem cells from it. They plan to place an ear-shaped scaffold in the stem cell mixture so the cells could take on the desired shape and structure. They plan to use chemicals to persuade the stem cells to transform into cartilage cells. The researchers report that they have been able to create the cartilage in the scaffold, but want to do more safety testing before they use the technique on patients.
One of the researchers, Patrizia Ferretti, M.D., told the BBC: “It is really exciting to have the sort of cells that are not tumourogenic, which can go back into the same patient so we don’t have the problem of immunosuppression and can do the job you want them to do. It would be the Holy Grail to do this procedure through a single surgery, so decreasing enormously the stress for the children and having a structure that hopefully will be growing as the child grows.”
Martin Birchall, M.D. is a surgeon at University College, London, who was involved in the first operations to give patients lab-grown windpipes. He said of the ear project, “If you had something that was truly regenerative, that would be transformative.”
