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CHICAGO - Researchers at Children's Hospital Boston report an important advance in tissue engineering of the penis, raising hopes that men with severe impotence - due to penile trauma, surgery, cancer, congenital malformations or other conditions - may someday be able to regain sexual function.
These findings, presented at the American Urological Association meeting in Chicago, have implications for men who need reconstruction of the penis, and for men whose penis is intact but has suffered nerve damage - such as men who have undergone radical surgery for prostate cancer.
Although the body of the penis can be grown in the lab through tissue engineering using smooth muscle cells, the organ needs a working network of nerves in order to achieve erection and function sexually. This animal study, led by Anthony Atala, MD, a pediatric urologist and director of Tissue Engineering at Children's Hospital Boston, showed that implantation of engineered tissue made of collagen can coax nerves to regenerate in the penis.
The investigators cut the cavernosal nerves - the two bundles of nerves innervating the penis - in 90 rats. At the injury site, they implanted either a graft of the rats' own nerves, or a graft made from collagen, a natural protein found in connective tissue. Some severed nerves were left untreated. The collagen grafts had been engineered to form a channel shape, similar to the natural sheath of a nerve, and follow-up studies three months later showed that the rats' own nerve cells had regenerated and infiltrated this ''scaffolding'' material. ''We used the body's own healing abilities to create the tissue,'' explains Atala.
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