Researchers have successfully used an artificial womb to incubate a fetal lamb for the second time.
The feat offers fresh hope for the future of care for premature babies, as experts hope this fluid-filled plastic bag could help them develop their organs and grow.
It was first performed by researchers in Philadelphia earlier this year. Now scientists in Australia have replicated the device.
In the latest study, fetal lambs were placed in the custom-made bags for one week to test how they reacted and developed in that environment.
The lambs were born healthy from the womb with no signs of brain damage.
Every year about 30,000 babies in the United States are born critically premature, meaning they are born before 26 weeks out of the normal 37-week development process.
The introduction of an artificial womb could help premature babies develop their organs and get them to a healthier size before being born.
Researchers have incubated a premature lamb for the second time in an artificial womb. This fluid-filled plastic bag is able to carry the lamb till it is at a healthier age to be born
Researchers from the University of Western Australia, Australia’s Women and Infants Research Foundation and Tohoku University Hospital in Japan said that several lambs grew for a week in the artificial womb.
Once they were born, they appeared to be healthy with no brain damage.
The new method has been named by researchers as the ‘ex-vivo uterine environment’ or ‘EVE’.
This is not the first time that an artificial womb has been used to carry fetal lambs.
In April, researchers from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia used a similar method of incubating lambs.
The artificial wombs were able to carry the lambs for four weeks without any damage to the brain or organs.
Most of the lambs used were humanely killed so researchers could analyze the organs and how they developed.
Before these artificial wombs, researchers had only been able to keep a lamb alive in an artificial system for 60 hours.
And those lambs experienced severe brain damage.
These artificial systems are studied to see how the lambs react and develop in them so that the information can eventually be used for fetal babies.
The lambs used from researchers in both studies were 105 to 115 days old, which is equivalent to 23 weeks for babies.
Researchers are hoping this developing medical solution could help babies as early as 22 weeks that are born premature.
Not only would those babies develop some vital organs, but it would significantly increase survival rates.
The artificial womb is filled with amniotic fluids to mimic the conditions in the mother’s womb.
An external oxygenator will then take on the role of the placenta by changing oxygen that is circulating the system and turn it into carbon dioxide.
The artificial womb held the lambs for a week before they were born.
In both studies, the fetal heart was relied on to power the artificial womb.
The heart is closely monitored so that it doesn’t get overwhelmed while the other organs in the lamb’s body develop.
But critics have said that these methods could be dangerous because of how different lambs are from babies.
For instance, lambs are only in the womb for five months while babies are in there for eight to nine months.
Also, lambs are born far larger than babies. The size could change how the artificial womb would have to work for a small baby.
Another criticism against the artificial womb is that it could infringe on women’s rights to have an abortion because most of the debate is around the viability of the fetus.
But researchers aren’t expecting to test this new system on babies for another five years, so there is still time to develop the artificial womb.