A damaged penis can be put back in line by sticking a synthetic ‘plaster’ on it. At least in pigs.
There is a bit of a taboo in men: erection problems. Yet at least 17 percent of Dutch men suffer from it. Between the ages of 40 and 70, this even applies to half. Often the cause is damage (for example due to an illness or ‘misuse’). A team of researchers from the South China University of Technology now seems to have found a solution: an artificial piece of tissue that replaces the damaged part. According to the publication in Matter are erections possible afterwards.
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Repair wound
The penis contains spongy erectile tissue that fills with blood when aroused, causing it to erect. To ensure that the blood does not immediately flow back, the white coat (TA) the blood vessels at the beginning of the penis together. If there is damage to the TA, maintaining an erection becomes a difficult story.
There is actually little research into restoring erectile function. The only method that currently exists is to repair the ‘injury’ by sticking a piece of tissue on it that comes from elsewhere in the body. The disadvantage of this is that the immune system can reject the ‘patch’ and, moreover, the method often does not work sufficiently.
Synthetic penis
Xuetao Shi and colleagues have now built a synthetic fabric based on polyvinyl alcohol (a substance that is already used in latex paint, glue and hair spray, among other things). This artificial white coat (ATA) has the same curly microstructure as natural TA.
After successful laboratory tests, the test followed: the artificial ‘will patch’ was used on mini pigs with damage to their TA. After a month, a large proportion of the males turned out to have a stiff (curled) lance again after injecting a saline solution (see photo above this article).
The researchers think they know why not all pigs benefited fully from the repair. In addition to the TA, other tissues in the penis can also be affected, such as the erectile tissue mentioned earlier. Shi and his team hope to find solutions for this in the future as well. Who knows, it might even be possible to build a completely synthetic penis.
Sources: Matter, Cell Pres via EurekAlert!
Image: Alexa/Pixabay