Ear to grow

Despite the fantastic successes of modern medicine, it still has many opponents, with all its stem cells and tissue engineering. They frighten immature souls with a lot of horror stories, they say, “God forbid, a leg grows on your head.” This is exactly what happened to a patient at the Johns Hopkins University clinic: an ear grew on her arm. However, the process was completely controlled - this is how doctors received a ready-made organ for transplantation.

It all started with a banal visit to the doctor, to whom Sherry Walter complained of pain in her left ear. The woman was diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma, a malignant tumor of the skin epithelium. Metastases managed to penetrate into the ear canal, so surgeons had to remove not only the outer ear, but also the cervical tonsils, several lymph nodes and even part of the skull bone. And soon Professor Patrick Byrne outlined the sad prospect of wearing an ear prosthesis for the unfortunate woman : due to the absence of part of the skull, “the only way to attach the prosthesis may be glue or adhesive tape.” “We both agreed that this was not an option,” adds Byrne.

However, there was another possibility: to restore the shell using tissue engineering, using cartilage, skin and vessels borrowed from the patient’s face and neck. With this, the situation was also not going well, because both Shelley’s face and neck suffered serious damage during the operation. And then Dr. Byrne “quite by accident” remembered one almost fantastic method.

In fact, Byrne and his colleagues’ method was thought out in advance, and the doctors were just waiting for the right patient to try it on. According to the plan, the ear can be partially reconstructed with the materials that are available, and then implanted under the skin of the forearm. Here it will be able to live, feed and develop for some time (no, it will not hear anything: after all, it is just an empty ear), and then the already “ripe” ear can be put in place (the main thing in this case is not to confuse and get exactly the left one).

Surprisingly, the woman made up her mind. To begin with, doctors sewed a plastic bag with saline solution under the skin of the arm so that it would stretch enough. Only a few weeks later a partially reconstructed ear was placed in its place. Four months later it was removed and sewn to the head. Doctors “connected” the ear to the vascular and nervous systems, and then followed long procedures for final shaping. It all ended on October 2: after a series of operations that lasted almost two years for Shelley, the young ear found itself in its rightful place.

Photo: Johns Hopkins Hospital