A COMMON test of an unborn baby鈥檚 health could also provide a treatment for
some birth defects. The cells in the amniotic fluid鈥攚hich is often sampled
for genetic testing鈥攃an be grown into the tissue needed to patch up the
defects.
One in 5000 babies is born with a 鈥渂ody wall defect鈥�, such as a hole in the
abdomen or chest. Surgeons can correct it if they have enough tissue, but babies
are often too small for a graft to be taken from elsewhere on their bodies.
One solution is to take cells from an unborn baby and grow tissue for later surgery
(快猫短视频, 26 July 1997, p 13).
But taking the cells can trigger a miscarriage.
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Now it turns out you don鈥檛 need to touch the fetus directly at all. Dario
Fauza and Amir Kaviani at the Children鈥檚 Hospital in Boston have found
early-stage embryonic cells floating in the amniotic fluid of a pregnant
woman.
When they seeded a scaffold with the cells, they grew into connective tissue
much faster than cells taken directly from a fetus, probably because they were
younger, the pair told a meeting of the American College of Surgeons in New
Orleans this week. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 know whether they鈥檙e true stem cells, but they
proliferate very quickly,鈥� says Fauza.
Doctors already take amniotic fluid 16 weeks into a pregnancy to look for
genetic abnormalities鈥攁 common procedure called an amniocentesis. If scans
suggests a baby might have defects, Fauza says, doctors could isolate cells from
this fluid for later surgery. 鈥淭his is elegant because many women have an
补尘苍颈辞肠别苍迟别蝉颈蝉.鈥�
鈥淭his sounds good to me because it鈥檚 a nice, unproblematic source,鈥� says
Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, a tissue engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Cambridge.
Fauza鈥檚 team has used amniotic cells to repair lambs with defects in their
body wall and is waiting to see how they fare. But in principle, he feels ready
to use amniotic cells to heal a baby.