Fw: TOXIC NEWS UPDATE ON BREAST IMPLANTS

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Subject: TOXIC NEWS UPDATE ON BREAST IMPLANTS

TOXIC NEWS UPDATE ON BREAST IMPLANTS

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Fat ChanceBY Amber Bethel, Staff WriterThe love handles you don’t want today may become the breasts you want tomorrow. Tulane University Health Sciences Center researchers are working to grow fat cells in a lab setting — fat that could one day be used in lieu of artificial implants in plastic surgery. Dr. A. Jansen, Tulane associate professor of surgery and chief of plastic surgery, says researchers will explore the ability to predict fat growth through clinical need. “There is a tremendous amount of breast reconstruction performed over the world for breast cancer and the reconstruction requires either an implant being placed or using a patient’s own tissue,” Jansen says. Using a patient’s tissue is a complex, high-risk operation, Jansen says. His team wants to simplify breast reconstruction. “We would like to grow the patient’s own fat into a breast and then be able to place it simply, lessening the hospital time and hospital problems with taking tissue from another area of the body,” he says. Jansen and chemical engineer, Kim O’Connor, have been working on the project for more than five years. Their findings were published in the December issue of “Tissue Engineering.” “What we have discovered so far is that we truly can grow fat outside of the body,” Jansen says. “And we have looked at, and are able to project, the rates of growth of fat, and looking at different types of fat and what would be the most durable and be able to survive outside the body.” Hong Song, a graduate student in chemical engineering, has been involved with the project since 1998. He says there is nothing controversial about the cells used in the research: They’re all donated from liposuction patients. “They’re discarded cells, something people don’t want,” Song says. “They actually want to get rid of them as much as possible.” Liposuction patients sign a waiver allowing their fat cells to be used for the research, Song says. “Most people have no problem with that,” he says. “The cells they don’t want are leading to something people can really benefit from later.” Jansen says the cells grown in the laboratory are genetically no different than natural cells. “In fact, they are natural cells,” Jansen says. He says there are many uses for this type of tissue engineering. “Our lab is concentrating on growing a fat tissue, which is very difficult and delicate to grow.” Song says labs throughout the world are working to engineer tissue. The only lab-grown tissue now on the market is used to replace skin in cases where someone is badly burned. “It’s natural,” Song says. “People want something natural to be used on their bodies. Right now they’re used to silicon implants or injections, which are all synthetic. With that you carry the risk of human rejection. With a soft tissue product you won’t have this problem.” Jansen is hopeful the team will have some soft tissue constructs, which hold the tissue in place, ready for human testing in the next five to 10 years. “These procedures we think would be much safer in that we wouldn’t have to take tissue from somewhere else in the patient’s body and then transplant it to another area,” Jansen says. “We would simply take a small amount of fat, grow whatever structure we need to grow in the tissue engineering laboratory and then put it into the patient, hopefully in an outpatient-type procedure.” Jansen says the implants would be safer and eventually less expensive than the alternative. “We would not store these implants in anything that is permanent such as silicone,” he says. The team is developing different types of scaffolding on which the fat cells grow. “These are then bio-absorbable,” Jansen says. “In other words, the body then absorbs them and the body’s tissue grows into these fat constructs or scaffolding that we have implanted.” The laboratory was set up with a grant from the Brown Foundation. Jansen says researchers are “feverishly” looking for more funding and applying for grants to help them continue work. “We feel that this type of research will propel reconstructive surgery into the next millennium with the goal of using off-the-shelf live tissue to rebuild and reconstruct defects from trauma, tumor removal and potentially to replace breast implants,” he says. • 01/13/2003 - Vol. 128 - Issue 133 - Page 1

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