Surgeons Have Found A Better Way To Reconstruct Nipples After Mastectomy

Dr. Jason Spector, Professor of Plastic Surgery and his team at Weill Cornell Medicine set out to engineer a better alternative to the existing technique used in breast reconstruction surgery.

A new technique to reconstruct more natural-looking nipples for patients who have undergone breast reconstruction after mastectomy has been developed by Dr Jason Spector and his team at Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.

Currently, surgeons use various approaches to reconstruct nipples using flaps of the patient’s skin. However, the healing process often causes the reconstructed nipple to flatten over time, which can be disappointing for patients.

The newly-created nipple reconstruction technique uses a 3D-printed scaffold made of a polymer that is already widely used in surgical devices. The scaffold and the body’s healing processes create nipples that not only look and feel real, but also maintain long-lasting projection, unlike previous reconstruction approaches.

The team, including lead author Dr. Xue Dong, a postdoctoral associate in Dr. Spector’s lab, 3-D printed the polymer into a scaffold recreating the size and shape of a nipple. Using an animal model, they showed that over time the scaffold breaks down, and the body’s natural healing process re-fills the space with fatty and vascular tissues typically found in a nipple.

“The best tissue engineer is the body itself. If you create the right conditions and use the right scaffold in the right size, the body itself will engineer the tissue.”

Dr Jason Spector

The scaffold is biocompatible and dissolves over time, and the body’s natural healing process refills the space with fatty and vascular tissues typically found in a nipple. The technique could be quickly available for women undergoing mastectomy because the material is already safe and widely used in humans and could go through a rapid process for US Food and Drug Administration clearance.

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