China News Service, Guangzhou, February 17 (Cai Minjie, Wu Xiaodan, Han Yurou) Infertility caused by endometrial damage is expected to usher in new treatments.
The Pearl River Hospital of Southern Medical University recently released news that the hospital team proposed a kind of reconfigurable uterus-derived materials (RUMs), which can deal with the problem of uterine repair.
In animal experiments, the severely damaged uterus of mice was almost completely repaired, and the mice achieved normal pregnancy, fetal development and live birth.
The technology is expected to be available for clinical use within 4 years.
The above research was published in Advanced Materials, a journal in the field of regenerative materials. The first author of the article is Yi Xiao, a doctoral student at the Center for Obstetrics and Gynecology, Zhujiang Hospital, Southern Medical University, and the corresponding author is the director of the Institute of Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, Center for Translational Medicine, Zhujiang Hospital. Gao Yi.
After the opening of the three-child policy, "wanting to have a baby but not being able to" is a fertility dilemma that many families are encountering.
Qiao Jie, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a well-known expert in reproductive medicine, mentioned in a report published online in The Lancet in 2021 that the infertility rate in my country has risen from 12% in 2007 to 15% in 2010. It rose to around 18%.
"'Infertility' is their hidden pain." said Wang Yifeng, director of the Center for Obstetrics and Gynecology of Zhujiang Hospital. Among them, uterine infertility caused by endometrial damage is becoming more and more common.
The endometrium is a highly regenerative tissue that undergoes up to about 400 growth and shedding cycles during a woman's reproductive phase.
The endometrial injury caused by various reasons such as induced abortion, curettage, uterine cavity surgery, infection, etc. may cause endometrial aplasia, resulting in decreased menstruation, amenorrhea, repeated miscarriage and infertility.
Endometrial damage has been reported to occur in approximately 2% to 22% of infertile patients.
According to reports, in order to achieve functional regeneration, people often need to implant extracellular matrix (ECM) scaffold materials into the damaged uterine wall in the process of repairing the uterus. However, due to poor reconstruction performance, these materials cannot penetrate deep into the endometrium to achieve complete repair. Therefore, it cannot effectively prevent intrauterine adhesions, thereby impairing the ability of the uterus to repair, and ultimately affecting the conception rate and the safe birth of the baby.
In view of this, Wang Yifeng and Yi Xiao, together with Gao Yi, Wang Shutao of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Professor Fan Junbing of the School of Basic Medicine of Southern Medical University, carried out a four-year cooperative research and proposed a reconfigurable uterus-derived material. (RUMs), which have tunable states and morphologies for efficient uterine repair challenges.
According to reports, the material is a composite of human placental stem cells and a hydrogel scaffold.
"Based on the structural characteristics of the uterus, this study prepared injectable RUMs gel and RUMs patch, wherein the RUMs gel can penetrate deep into the endometrial cavity to effectively prevent intrauterine adhesions and improve angiogenesis, endometrial regeneration, and muscle collagen. At the same time, the RUMs patch adheres to the uterine wall to accelerate wound healing and prevent the adhesion of the wound to the abdominal tissue.” Yi Xiao said, not only that, RUMs can also secrete a series of cytokines to regulate the uterine microenvironment, Thereby promoting wound healing and uterine repair.
It is understood that in order to study the ability of RUM gel and patch to synergistically repair uterine injury, the research team constructed a rat model with severe uterine injury.
By treatment with RUMs gel and patch, the rat's uterine structure was almost regenerated on day 15, effectively helping the mice to get pregnant and the babies born to return to normal.
Gao Yi said that this project is based on the Institute of Regenerative Medicine of the Translational Medicine Research Center of Zhujiang Hospital. In the future, the research team will continue to explore the application of regenerative materials in liver and other fields.
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