These mice will leak no more

[Jangler]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20784-artificial-anal-sphincter-could-limit-bowel-incontinence.html

Another milestone for custom-crafted transplants: the world's first lab-built sphincters. The breakthrough offers hope to countless people who have become incontinent through damage to their own anal sphincters.

The spare-part sphincters were made with some human cells, but have been implanted only in mice so far. Researchers made them by growing donated smooth muscle cells from human sphincters alongside gut nerve cells from mice in circular moulds.

"The smooth muscle cells align themselves around the mould in a perfect, continuous circle," says Khalil Bitar of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center's Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Bitar led the research team while working at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. "The neural cells then innervate this structure and make filamentous structures and projections around it," he says.

By testing the replacement sphincter with electric shocks and chemicals, Bitar's team made sure that it contracts and relaxes as a normal sphincter does to keep gut contents in or let them out. More importantly, it survived and grew when implanted beneath the skin in the upper back of mice. "It rapidly gets its own supply of blood vessels, and nerves rapidly connect with the mouse's own nervous system," says Bitar.

[mmmbeans]

Says what?

[Doyle]

Janglers research to solve his problem finally pays off.

[charlotte49er]

F'ing GREAT!

They can make artificial sphincters, but they can't make me a set of Bionic Legs! Even Stem Cell research for Spinal Chord injuries such as mine, has slowed!

I settle for a transplanted horse **** that worked! I'd be the most popular guy in Charlotte! :D