About the episode
About half of men between the ages of 40 and 70 sometimes or regularly suffer from erectile dysfunction. About 5% get Peyronie’s disease after an injury to the penis, which can be very painful and where scar tissue makes it difficult for the penis to function.
Some studies look at how the patient’s own tissue can be repaired in such a case. For example, using tissue from other parts of the body where the damage is. But according to Chinese researchers, this doesn’t work very often, so they came up with another idea: artificial fabric.
They have developed something similar to penile tissue that plays a role in getting an erection that shouldn’t be dangerous to insert into the body among other tissue. Now comes caveat number one from this study: They then started testing it on pigs.
There it says: in pigs with damaged tissue in the penis, but as you will understand this almost always means that the animals have not suffered that damage. This makes these types of studies difficult to discuss. Is being able to get an erection on your own thanks to inventions like this worth the suffering of these pigs? I would say no. So just wait until it can be tested another way.
But it worked. An erection was again possible with the implanted tissue. At least: with these pigs. Has the entire penis been restored? No. Which is also side note number two. Often, multiple types of tissue are damaged in these types of injuries. And despite the fact that the man-made tissue was still doing its job after a month and wasn’t shed, the surrounding tissue didn’t recover.
They want to change that in follow-up research. They also think it should be able to work in other places on the body as well, in case of other damage. As far as I’m concerned, they can then conduct those studies on themselves, and we’ll know even faster if it really works for people.
Read more: An artificial tissue restores erectile function in pigs.
