3D-Printed, Implanted Ovaries Produce Healthy Offspring for Infertile Mice

With the objective of restoring fertility and hormone production in women who have undergone cancer treatments, Northwestern University biomedical engineers have successfully implanted ovary structures into mice that actually ovulate. They removed a female mouse's ovary and replaced it with a bioprosthetic ovary, allowing the mouse to ovulate and give birth to healthy pups. Constructed of 3D-printed scaffolds that house immature eggs, the bioprosthetic ovaries have also boosted hormone production and restored fertility in mice - the researchers' ultimate goal. The architecture of the scaffold is made out of gelatin, a biological hydrogel made from broken-down collagen that is safe to use in humans. The team found a gelatin temperature that allows it to be self-supporting, not collapse, and lead to building multiple layers. Printing a gelatin with such well-defined and self-supported geometry had not been done before.

Transcript

00:00:15 The real breakthrough here is that we're building a true ovarian bioprosthesis and the goal of this project is to be able to restore fertility and endocrine health to young cancer patients who have been sterilized by their cancer treatment. Right now we're able to do that with young mice and the goal ultimately is to provide this back to patients. Teresa and I have both wanted

00:00:37 to create an ovary bioprosthesis or some sort of implant so we said we need something that we can mold and build for exactly this purpose and Ramille Shah's lab was right next door. You know, from the very beginning with any collaboration, it's always great if you ... if it's built on mutual respect for each other's work. (Right) Scaffolds, if you think about a scaffold

00:01:12 for a building, they're setting that up and they're building something that will eventually support itself. We have constructed these scaffolds out of gelatin and gelatin is just broken-down collagen. And collagen is the most abundant extracellular matrix in our body. It's what gives us structure. It's in our bones, in our skin, etc. And the great advantage is doing gelatin over collagen

00:01:47 is that it's much easier to process but it still has the same what we call "bio activity" as collagen. So these illustrate the different pore structures or architectures we can achieve with our different ink platforms, as well as the 3-D printer. And these pores will house the different cell types and we're really trying to investigate how the structure can

00:02:10 influence cell behavior and viability. And it also can expand towards other soft organ and tissue engineering applications because we have the ability to 3-D print basically any architecture that we think will be optimal for different cell types. This is an example of one of the scaffolds that Alex has 3-D printed made out of gelatin. Our skilled technician removed the ovary of the

00:02:39 mouse, replaced it with our scaffolds, sutured those back up and we mated some of those animals and we were able to get live birth out of these scaffolds. Our hope is that one day, this ovarian bioprosthesis is really the ovary of the future.