Vitals Spotlight - We Give the Doctor an Exam

Dr. Anthony Atala is a pediatric urologist at the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Dr. Atala led a study for engineering artificial penises in rabbits. Researchers used the animals to create the artificial penises and the rabbits used their new organs to father baby rabbits. Even more surprising was that rabbits with the engineered penises attempted to have sex with females within a minute of the time they met and were able to produce offspring.

Dr Atala spoke about this study: “It provides a tailor-made transplant. Once the tissue is there, the body recognizes the tissue as its own. We are seeing babies born with deficient genitalia all the time. That was the inspiration for this work. There are no good options today. Patients with congenital anomalies, penile cancer, traumatic penile injury, and some types of organic erectile dysfunction could benefit from this technology in the future. The process takes six weeks from beginning to end, he said, and there is reason to believe a penis grafted onto a baby would grow with the child.”

Full report is available online in the Nov. 9-13 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Anthony Atala (usnews.com)

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Tags: artificial penises in rabbits, Dr. Anthony Atala, Regenerative science

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