Growing noses on foreheads and 5 other wacky ways doctors make body parts
Doctors have grown a new nose on a patient’s own forehead after he suffered severe facial injuries in a car accident.
What is more remarkable than the doctors in China who were able to successfully grow a nose on a man's forehead?
(YouTube Screengrab)
Perhaps the fact that it isn't the first time body parts have been grown independently in such a manner.
Here are some other ways body parts have been sprouted, printed and just generally cultivated in unorthodox ways.
1) Woman grows a new ear on her arm
Sherrie Walters, 42, got skin cancer and had to have her ear and part of her skull removed. Doctors were able to grow a new ear on her arm using cartilage from her rib.
(Johns Hopkins University/Courtesy)
2) Fingertip on stomach
Orange News reports that after sawing off the tip of his finger, 20-year-old furniture worker Wang Yongjun was rushed to a hospital in the Liaong province of China.
Dr. Huang Xuesong explains what happened next:
"We had to make a quick decision or he could have lost his finger. We decided to cultivate a new fingertip on his stomach."
(Via Orange News)
3) Meet Vacanti mouse
The Vacanti mouse was a lab mouse that had what looked like a human ear grown on its back.
Wikipedia photo.
According to a medical study, the "ear" was actually an ear-shaped cartilage structure grown by seeding cow cartilage cells into a biodegradable ear-shaped mold and then implanting it under the skin of the mouse.
4) Liver in a petri dish
A group in Yokohama reported it has grown a primitive liver in a petri dish using a person's skin cells.
The rudimentary liver is the first complex, functioning organ to be grown in the lab from human, skin-derived stem cells. When scientists transplanted the organ into a mouse, it worked a lot like a regular human liver, according to NPR.
Illustrtaion of liver Gray's Anatomy via Wikimedia Commons.
5) 3-D-printed lower jaw
Back in 2012, LayerWise in Belgium used 3-D printing to make a replacement lower jaw out of titanium for an 83-year-old Dutch woman.
(Yorick Jansen/AFP/Getty Images)
Since then, 3-D printing has been used to make prosthetics both internal and external. University of Michigan researchers in February used a 3-D printed airway to hold an ailing baby’s bronchus open.
And when cancer patient Eric Moger lost a large chunk of his face to tumor removal, doctors in Britain replaced the missing part with a 3-D printed prosthesis.