Researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have grown an artificial human ear in their lab.
Researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have grown an artificial human ear in their lab.
The ear was created using animal tissue cells that were engineered to grow on a flexible titanium wire frame shaped like a human ear.
Using a wire frame gives an ear the correct shape, while still being flexible like a real human ear.
Previous research projects from one of the same scientists grew a human ear on the back of a mouse.
After the most recent ear was grown on a wire, it was transplanted and grown in a male nude rat for 12 more weeks.
This kind of research could help people with deformed or missing outer ears get functional and life like implants.
One of the researchers, Doctor Thomas Cervantes said: “In a clinical model, what we would do is harvest a small sample of cartilage, that the patient has, and then expand that so we could go ahead and do the same process.”
Cervantes said that human clinical trials for ear transplants might be able to start in around five years.
