GoKawiilWhat makes it extra special is the role of the cream-colored tub that sits on its surface. Ten months ago, González, a biomedical scientist who developed the device with his colleagues at the Carlos Simon Foundation, carefully placed a freshly donated human uterus in the tub. The team connected it to the device’s tubes and pumped in modified human blood.
The device kept the uterus alive for a day—a new feat that could represent the first step to the long-term maintenance of uteruses outside the human body. The work has not yet been published.
The team members want to keep donated human uteruses alive long enough to see a full menstrual cycle. They hope this will help them study diseases of the uterus and learn more about how embryos burrow their way into the organ’s lining at the start of a pregnancy. They also hope that future iterations of their device might one day sustain the full gestation of a human fetus.
The machine is technically called PUPER, which stands for “preservation of the uterus in perfusion.” But González’s colleague Xavier Santamaria says the team has adopted a nickname for it: “We call it ‘Mother.’”
The organ in the machine
González and Santamaria, medical vice president of the Carlos Simon Foundation, demonstrated how the device might work when I visited the foundation in Valencia, Spain, earlier this month (although it held no organs on that day).
Both are interested in learning more about implantation, the moment at which an embryo attaches itself to the lining of a uterus—essentially, the very first moment of pregnancy.
The foundation’s founder and director, Carlos Simon, believes it’s a sticking point in IVF: Scientists have made many improvements to the technology over the years, but the failure of embryos to implant underlies plenty of unsuccessful IVF cycles, he says. Being able to carefully study how the process works in a real, living organ might give the team a better idea of how to prevent those failures.