Growing vocal cords

waltky

Wise ol' monkey
Feb 6, 2011
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Growing vocal cords...

Scientists Grow Vocal Cord Tissue
November 18, 2015: Most people have temporarily lost their voice at some point due to laryngitis – a throat infection – or from too much screaming at events such as football games or concerts.
But for millions of people worldwide, damage to their vocal cords is permanent, according to Nathan Welham, a University of Wisconsin speech-language pathologist. “Certain congenital problems or scarring or tissue loss following surgery … can cause substantial voice loss that can be very challenging to treat with our current methods,” he said. “These types of voice problems can have a devastating impact” on people’s personal and professional lives. New research by Welham and his colleagues – documented in the journal Science Translational Medicine – involves growing vocal cord tissue in a laboratory.

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Vocal folds, commonly known as vocal cords, consist of two elastic bands of muscle tissue that vibrate in response to air flow from the lungs to produce sound.​

To do this, larynx tissue was taken from a cadaver and from four individuals who had had their voice boxes removed for reasons other than cancer. The specialized cells were extracted and coaxed to grow on a three-dimensional collagen scaffold. After about two weeks, the tissue had grown enough to implant into the cadavers of dogs. Once transplanted there, the regenerated vocal folds were grown to human size, which is between 15 to 18 millimeters in length and about one millimeter thick, Welham said. The newly grown tissue was tested by attaching the engineered vocal chords to an artificial windpipe. Researchers then blew humidified air through the larynxes.

The engineered vocal tissue made an unnatural but encouraging sound, according to Welham. "The voice sounds a little bit like a kazoo, kind of robotic sounding like, ‘Eeeeeee,’ “ he said. “Something like that. So, you would hear that sound and think, 'Gosh, that sounds synthesized or robotic. It doesn't sound so human.' But that's how it should sound in this context." The new vocal cord tissue doesn't seem to trigger the body's immune response, according to researchers. That creates the possibility of transplanting the new vocal cords into humans. In addition, the tissue may be naturally protected against attack by the body's immune system. There are some tissues, such as the corneas in the eye, that do not stimulate an immune rejection. Human trials, however, are years away, Welham said.

Scientists Grow Vocal Cord Tissue
 
Boy born with no vocal cords learns to talk...

Born with no voice & low odds, boy talks with new voice box
Nov. 23, 2015 - Grant Hasse was born with two very rare conditions — one that's usually fatal, the other that should have left him unable to talk. But at almost 4 years old, he's a healthy bundle of energy after three dozen surgeries, including an innovative operation to create a new voice box.
Doctors discovered before he was born that Grant's upper airway was completely blocked, meaning that at birth, he'd be unable to breathe. Even with quick intervention, doctors said his survival chances were extremely slim. Only about 50 people born with the condition worldwide have survived. Even fewer are born with no vocal cords — an anomaly doctors didn't discover until after Grant was born. What helped save his life was an operation to insert a breathing tube while he was still partly in the womb.

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The Michigan boy is the first child for Andrea Hasse, a school principal, and her husband, Tadd, a carpenter. During a routine ultrasound when she was 18 weeks pregnant, they learned that something was "undeniably wrong," she said. The images showed that Grant's lungs seemed to be nearly fully developed, yet he wasn't due to be born for another five months. Cartilage blockage in his upper airway prevented his body from expelling fluid, causing his lungs to swell. "It was very earth-shattering for us," Andrea Hasse said. "We were given a 1 to 3 percent chance of survival. We clung to that 3 percent."

They were referred to specialists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, about an hour from their Clinton Township home. Because of the increasing fluid, her pregnancy became dangerous and doctors performed a cesarean section. Grant was just 27 weeks old and weighed less than 3 pounds. Dr. Glenn Green, a pediatric airway surgeon at the university's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, performed Grant's first surgery during the C-section. An opening to his windpipe below the blockage was created in the baby's neck as it protruded from his mother's belly. A breathing tube was inserted, and a handheld ventilator was attached as he was pulled from the womb and transferred to a breathing machine.

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