Laboratory-grown vaginas implanted into patients for the first time

Four young women from Mexico, who all suffer from a very severe form of Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome (MKRH), now have a chance at leading a normal sex life and even having children thanks to doctors from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina. The cause of MKRH syndrome is unknown, but it affects about one in every 5,000 newborn girls, causing the vagina and uterus to be either underdeveloped or absent. The four girls treated in this study all had a vulva (the external part of female genitalia), but each had an underdeveloped vagina and an abnormally-developed uterus.
The women had tissue samples taken from their genitals, which were then grown into vaginal canals in the lab. This video shows the process of growing the tissues:



After the tissues were grown and moulded into the proper shape canal to fit the individual patients, doctors performed surgery to form a canal and then implant the grown tissues inside. After just six months, the implanted tissues had formed fully-functional vaginal tissues, with no distinction between the patients' native cells and the implanted ones. Annual followup visits over the next eight years showed the organs were normal and functional. One of the four even reported that she hopes to have a big family one day.

The techniques used in this study have been applied to other parts of the body, such as the bladder and urethra, and doctors hope that they can be useful for other types of structures and organs as well.