Synthetic wombs could help premature babies


SOURCE: STUFF.CO.NZ
FEB 07, 2022

Peter Griffin is a freelance science and technology writer. He was the founding director of the Science Media Centre and founding editor of Sciblogs.co.nz.

OPINION: Synthetic wombs. Are there any other words in the English language that seem less suited to sitting side by side?

The process of carrying a child from conception to birth is as natural as it gets. But scientists will get to the point in the next decade where growing a human in an artificial womb is a viable alternative.

Why would anyone conceive of replacing something as old as life itself? According to US tech investor Sahil Lavingia,? artificially growing humans could counter future population decline.

He made the suggestion recently in a Twitter exchange with SpaceX? and Tesla? founder Elon Musk,? who has become obsessed with the depopulation issue. He worries it could leave too few humans left to fulfil his vision of colonising Mars.

Musk ignores the fact that we face a more immediate overpopulation issue which will see the global population spike to nearly 10 billion by 2064, dropping to 8.8b in 2100 as birth rates decline. The planet will be lucky to survive the next century before it gets some much-needed respite in the form of fewer human beings.

It was just two tech bros riffing, but synthetic wombs are a genuine focus of scientists. Over 1 million babies are born extremely prematurely around the world each year. They face a fight for their lives. Their underdeveloped lungs are fed with a ventilator to keep them alive but can suffer permanent damage in the process. Heart and brain damage are also common.

Stuff science columnist Peter Griffin.

ROBERT KITCHIN/STUFF

Stuff science columnist Peter Griffin.

A gentler way to nurture them is to replicate the conditions of the mother’s womb, feeding oxygen, blood and nutrients to the baby via an artificial umbilical cord. Animal trials have already shown this to be possible.

In 2017, American paediatric and fetal surgeon Dr Alan Flake? used the Biobag,? a polythene bag filled with synthetic amniotic fluid and antibiotics to keep it sterile. He put eight extremely premature lambs in Biobags, attaching their blood vessels to an oxygenator device to feed the blood flow produced by the lambs’ beating hearts.

He was able to keep lambs alive in their bags for four weeks (a lamb’s full gestation period is 20-21 weeks) and found that their heart function was near normal and the lungs and brains developed normally. The lambs were then briefly put on ventilators before being euthanised.

There are complex issues to overcome to make the Biobag viable for humans, but the scientists behind these trials suggest they could be used in neonatal intensive care units for babies born from 23 to 25 weeks gestation.

Pregnancy can also be exhausting, painful and sometimes dangerous. So could the Biobag become a mainstream way of sidestepping the physical toll of a normal pregnancy? It’s possible.

But like gene editing, which could help eliminate certain genetic diseases but also make designer babies possible, it would raise a host of societal issues we haven’t begun to work out.

The synthetic womb is a remarkable achievement, but one that should primarily give the most vulnerable a shot at life.

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