lab grown penis

[dragon]

First it was lab grown Vagina now lab grown penis. I can see them being a market for people wanting a bigger penis grown to your specifications.

Penises grown in laboratories could soon be tested on men by scientists developing technology to help people with congenital abnormalities, or who have undergone surgery for aggressive cancer or suffered traumatic injury.

Researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are assessing engineered penises for safety, function and durability. They hope to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and to move to human testing within five years.

Professor Anthony Atala, director of the institute, oversaw the team's successful engineering of penises for rabbits in 2008. "The rabbit studies were very encouraging," he said, "but to get approval for humans we need all the safety and quality assurance data, we need to show that the materials aren't toxic, and we have to spell out the manufacturing process, step by step."

The penises would be grown using a patient's own cells to avoid the high risk of immunological rejection after organ transplantation from another individual. Cells taken from the remainder of the patient's penis would be grown in culture for four to six weeks.

For the structure, they wash a donor penis in a mild detergent to remove all donor cells. After two weeks a collagen scaffold of the penis is left, on to which they seed the patient's cultured cells – smooth muscle cells first, then endothelial cells, which line the blood vessels. Because the method uses a patient's own penis-specific cells, the technology will not be suitable for female-to-male sex reassignment surgery.

"Our target is to get the organs into patients with injuries or congenital abnormalities," said Atala, whose work is funded by the US Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which hopes to use the technology to help soldiers who sustain battlefield injuries.

As a paediatric urological surgeon, Atala began his work in 1992 to help children born with genital abnormalities. Because of a lack of available tissue for reconstructive surgery, baby boys with ambiguous genitalia are often given a sex-change at birth, leading to much psychological anguish in later life. "Imagine being genetically male but living as a woman," he said. "It's a firmly devastating problem that we hope to help with."

Asif Muneer, a consultant urological surgeon and andrologist at University College hospital, London, said the technology, if successful, would offer a huge advance over current treatment strategies for men with penile cancer and traumatic injuries. At present, men can have a penis reconstructed using a flap from their forearm or thigh, with a penile prosthetic implanted to simulate an erection.

"My concern is that they might struggle to recreate a natural erection," he said. "Erectile function is a coordinated neurophysiological process starting in the brain, so I wonder if they can reproduce that function or whether this is just an aesthetic improvement. That will be their challenge."

Atala's team are working on 30 different types of tissues and organs, including the kidney and heart. They bioengineered and transplanted the first human bladder in 1999, the first urethra in 2004 and the first vagina in 2005.

Professor James Yoo, a collaborator of Atala's at Wake Forest Institute, is working on bioengineering and replacing parts of the penis to help treat erectile dysfunction. His focus is on the spongy erectile tissue that fills with blood during an erection, causing the penis to lengthen and stiffen. Disorders such as high blood pressure and diabetes can damage this tissue, and the resulting scar tissue is less elastic, meaning the penis cannot fill fully with blood.

"If we can engineer and replace this tissue, these men can have erections again," said Yoo, acknowledging the many difficulties. "As a scientist and clinician, it's this possibility of pushing forward current treatment practice that really keeps you awake at night."

link

[LaCroix]

So they need a donor penis (*yuck*) wheere they remove everything but the collagen, and then regrow the tissue with your own cells.

Knowing what this will certainly lead to - they either need a method to meddle with the scaffolding for sizing reasons, or, even easier to do - I see a high demand for recentyly deceased male organ donors of african origin.

[Eulogy]

Hell, don't quote me on this, but there might be ways to have more than one functional penis from this. Porn is going to get very interesting...

[Simon_Jester]

So they need a donor penis (*yuck*) wheere they remove everything but the collagen, and then regrow the tissue with your own cells.

Knowing what this will certainly lead to - they either need a method to meddle with the scaffolding for sizing reasons, or, even easier to do - I see a high demand for recentyly deceased male organ donors of african origin.

Given that major surgery of this type is inevitably going to have risks, I doubt many men are going to want to risk trading in a functional penis for a replacement. It's not like you can swap the old one back on if you're not satisfied with the new one.

Even accepting the whole self-image thing that might motivate this, what's the point of going from a Honda to a Lexus if the Lexus doesn't work?

[HMS Sophia]

Hell, don't quote me on this, but there might be ways to have more than one functional penis from this. Porn is going to get very interesting...

It seems the scaffold is built on with tissue/cells from the original penis, so I find the multiple penis thing unlikely. Plus ethical issues etc.
What I am curious about is what this would mean in terms of bottom surgery for FTM people, i.e. could it be built from a testosterone enlarged cliterus. I wonder if this will mean more functional phallus' for them. AFAIK the results of phallosplasty's are currently... less than stellar.

[His Divine Shadow]

Good news for that Wutang Clan guy though.

[Purple]

Good news for that Wutang Clan guy though.

Who?

[HMS Sophia]

Good news for that Wutang Clan guy though.

Who?

Google is your friend:
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainmen ... -1.1866432

[LadyTevar]

What always gets me is that male babies with indeterminate genitals are sex-changed. Do the parents even get a say? Couldn't these male babies 'grow out of it'? Why is the policy to turn them female, and give them mental problems down the road, when they could simply leave them as is and let what happens happen?

[HMS Sophia]

What always gets me is that male babies with indeterminate genitals are sex-changed. Do the parents even get a say? Couldn't these male babies 'grow out of it'? Why is the policy to turn them female, and give them mental problems down the road, when they could simply leave them as is and let what happens happen?

It's the parent's decision, advised by the doctor.
Intersex people with indeterminate genitals often end up identifying with the acronym CAFAB/CAMAB, that is, Coercively Assigned Female/Male At Birth. The post-natal surgery is something that (in my reading) is suggested by the doctor (oooh, they'll never be able to live a normal life.) and decided upon by the parents (oh god! our baby is abnormal says the doctor!)...
From studies I've seen, generally there is no medical reason for this surgery. The child will not be harmed if they are not surgically assigned to one end of the spectrum of another and allowed to make a decision for themselves when they are somewhat older.
It's not always male leaning, either. Non-conforming genitals come in as many varieties as people, if you'll excuse the glibness. But they do always seem to end up receiving post-natal assignment surgery.
Funny that, isn't it.

[Broomstick]

What always gets me is that male babies with indeterminate genitals are sex-changed. Do the parents even get a say? Couldn't these male babies 'grow out of it'? Why is the policy to turn them female, and give them mental problems down the road, when they could simply leave them as is and let what happens happen?

It's the parent's decision, advised by the doctor.

That's not how I would put it.

There's quite a history behind the "lop the nubbin off and make the kid a girl" meme in medicine, but the nutshell version is that it's mainly done for the mental comfort of the adults.

You can't say "it's the parents decision" when every doctor is saying it is vital for a child to have a strong gender identity and the kid will be psychologically scarred for life if he/she doesn't have strongly defined gentilia. In the US, by 1970 parental refusal of "genital assignment surgery" on an intersex infant would probably be regarded as child abuse or neglect by most pediatric surgeons.

I've read a couple of case histories where the parents resisted initial pressure to get surgery only to have the child later "modified" when there was a legitimate reason for surgery and the doctors took it upon themselves to do a little extra work to make the kid look more normal.

Really, the history of intersex "treatment" in the latter half of the 20th Century is a real horror show.

Given the social and psychological pressure no, it was NOT the parents choice because the parents weren't getting accurate information and certainly weren't being adequately informed of possible complications down the road. It was the decision of the medical establishment, in no small part driven by one John Money who claimed that infants could be programmed to be one gender or another. Unfortunately, his biggest "success" turned out to be a disaster and the individual concerned later committed suicide, driven in part, I believe, by the psychological damage done to him.

All too often, the decision was based on a strict ruler measurement - if the infant's penis wasn't sufficiently long he was surgically remade into a "girl". Girls with overly large clitorises might be raised as boys... but also might have it surgically shortened (with little regard to the organ's function later in life).

From studies I've seen, generally there is no medical reason for this surgery. The child will not be harmed if they are not surgically assigned to one end of the spectrum of another and allowed to make a decision for themselves when they are somewhat older.

It turns out the damage comes mainly from adults going EEEEEK! over the kid. Babies, toddlers, and young children don't know that what's between their legs is abnormal or not, what they have is what's normal to them. Yes, at some point they'll find out they're different. Turns out that happened to most of the kids who were surgically made "normal" anyway.

It turns out that people are less damaged when able to make the decisions about their own body. It also turns out that quite a few of them would rather have funny-looking but functional genitals rather than something that looks normal but isn't.

As for why so many wind up being "assigned female" - it's simple, really. There's a saying "it's easier to make a hole than a pole" that sums it up nicely. Especially if it's a male-centric view of what's normal, and the main point is that a penis will fit into a vagina, not that the vagina/clitoris combination will be able to experience an orgasm. Sadly, that was too often the outcome - a vagina that would accommodate a penis but was sexually pretty useless for the owner.

Think I'll stop now. This sort of thing has always made me angry.

ETA: one bright spot is that since the 1990's/2000 there has been some radical re-thinking about the whole matter in the medical world. Surgery on intersex infants has dropped dramatically.

[HMS Sophia]

Thank you for expanding massively on an area where my knowledge is shamefully bare-boned, and putting me right in a few places.