Doctors use laboratory-grown cartilage for reconstruction of patients’ noses

April 14, 2014  12:38

Swiss scientists successfully reconstructed noses of five skin cancer patients – with the help of cartilage grown from the patients' own tissue, reported Fox News.

Utilizing a technique called tissue engineering, scientists at the University of Basel extracted very small amounts of cartilage from the patients’ noses, and then amplified the tissue in the lab. The resulting product: A relatively large mass of white, glossy cartilage – which could be easily shaped to fit each patient’s individual nose.

According to lead researcher Dr. Ivan Martin, this method of nasal reconstruction could be very appealing for those suffering from non-melanoma skin cancer, which commonly occurs on the nose because of its cumulative exposure to sunlight. Currently, surgeons must treat this condition by completely removing tumors from the nose, often cutting away at vital areas of cartilage in the process.

To create their lab-grown cartilage, Martin and his team took small biopsies from the nasal septum of five patients between the ages of 76 and 88, all of whom had severe nasal defects following skin cancer surgery. The extracted tissues were only a few millimeters in diameter.

The researchers then isolated the cartilage cells and multiplied them, using a combination of growth factors.

After around two weeks, the amplified cells were seeded onto a collagen membrane scaffold and cultured for two additional weeks. After this four week period, the pieces of cartilage had expanded 40 times the size of the original biopsy.

With such large amounts of tissue to work with, the surgeons could then shape the cartilage to fit the exact specifications of each patient.

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