A team of researchers has made artificial wombs with the desire to save the most vulnerable humans on Earth. The team includes Marcus Davey, Emily Partridge, and Alan Flake. They are neonatologists, developmental physiologists, and surgeons and take care of extremely premature babies at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). The latest prototype has been designed after three years of effort. This will give premature babies a better chance of survival than ever before.
They are currently conducting a trial on a lamb that has been submerged in the fluid, floating inside a transparent plastic bag. This bag doubles up as an artificial womb and it will be unzipped after some period and the lamb will be born.
The concept of Biobag came into existence in April 2017 when the CHOP team published their research in the journal Nature Communications. They have developed a way to gestate foetuses of sheep outside maternal bodies. These foetuses would eventually grow up to become lambs exactly similar to those that had grown in normal wombs.
An oxygenator is plugged to the lamb’s umbilical cord put inside the Biobag. This also removes carbon dioxide and delivers nutrients to the lamb. The bag contains warm, sterile, lab-made fluid and acts as an amniotic sac. The lamb breaths and swallows this fluid just like a human foetus would do.
According to Davey, they envision that in future the system will be in the national intensive care unit and ‘will look pretty much like a traditional incubator.’ A darkened environment will be created around Biobags to mimic the human womb, but the babies in these bags would be visible as never before: “Parents can actually look at their foetus in real time,” Flake adds.
Normal pregnancy period for humans is 40 weeks and those born before 37 weeks are considered premature. Premature birth is one of the greatest causes of death and disability among them in developed countries. The biobag extends the limits of saving a premature baby.
The story is based on an article published in The Guardian which had edited extract from Sex Robots & Vegan Meat: Adventures At The Frontier Of Birth, Food, Sex & Death, by Jenny Kleeman.
