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Grow your own nipples

Recreating nipples can be tricky

Scientists have managed to create dark skin by mixing pigmented and normal cells in the lab (Image: iStockphoto)

Researchers have devised a way of growing nipple-coloured skin in the lab, which may one day help surgeons to more accurately reconstruct breasts after a mastectomy.

The researchers believe they are the first to grow pigmented skin this way specifically for nipple reconstruction and say they have found a way of making sure the skin colour doesn't fade.

Australian scientists report their research in the March issue of the British Journal of Plastic Surgery.

There are currently two main ways of recreating nipples for women who have lost a breast, or breasts, to cancer.

One way involves tattooing a nipple on the reconstructed breast mound.

The other is to take pigmented skin from another part of the body, such as the groin crease or a spiral of skin from a remaining areola, the dark area surrounding the nipple, and transplant it.

But the colour of the new nipple fades with time, one of the biggest problems facing reconstructive surgeons.

Associate head of health sciences at South Australia's Flinders Medical Centre, Professor Tim Neild, says while the new nipple may look good at first, the results of transplants tend to be short-lived.

"We don't really know why but the number of pigmented cells recedes and the amount of pigment in each cell fades," he says.

This usually occurs between 12 months and two years of surgery.

Neild says fading is believed to occur because the transplanted skin suddenly finds itself in a foreign place where it is lacking the cellular signals needed to maintain its colour.

"Any cell ... in the body is constantly bombarded by hormones and chemicals leaking from nearby cells that are all signals telling the cell how to behave," he says.

"If you put cells in a different environment it acts differently because it's getting different signals."

Melanocytes to the rescue

The study's main author and Neild's colleague Dr Nicola Dean says she has grown a "pigmented skin construct" in a petri dish.

She mixed together normal keratinocytes, cells that produce the skin protein keratin, and melanocytes, cells that produce the pigment melanin, from the patient's own body.

"We took a biopsy of normal skin and artificially changed the ratio of melanocytes and keratinocytes," she says.

She did this by separating the cells from the skin's dermis, or connective tissue, growing separate skin cell cultures from both types of cell and then introducing them back onto the stored dermis.

In this way she changed the ratio of pigmented to non-pigmented cells from one-to-twelve to one-to-three.

Dean stresses that the technique is yet to be tried on a patient and says there are concerns that the growth factors used to encourage cell growth in vitro could also cause the transplanted cells to become cancerous.

But she says it highlights the complexities of breast reconstruction for women who have had a mastectomy.

Tags: health, biotechnology