Some interesting news. Scientists have managed to grow vocal fold tissue from a few human starter cells. The team of medical scientists, lead by Dr. Nathan V. Welham of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, then managed to transplant this new tissue to a larynx. Further to this they have been able to get functional sound from it. This ground breaking development, as reported in Science Translational Medicine (Volume 17, Issue 134 link), opens up the future possibility of new treatments for previously incurable conditions.
While we are able to currently treat a range of voice disorders, via therapy and surgery, some patients have fallen into a category where there are very few, if any, treatment options. With incurable cases, medical practitioners will try to alleviate some of the speech issues but inevitably some patients are faced with complete voice loss.
In routine cases the vocal folds are quite responsive to our current treatments. Not only are they small and capable of great power, but they can (if treated by a knowledgeable team of laryngologists, surgeons and therapists) have some layers sliced open for cyst removal with the full expectation of making a perfect recovery. The ideal result is that a patient has all essential (speech) and non-essential (singing) functions restored.
However where a patient’s condition involves malformation or destruction of the vocal folds, then medical staff can struggle to repair what is not present. Some examples include sulcus vocalis where the vocal folds are not formed properly in utero, incidents where a patient’s vocal surgery has accidentally removed too much vocal fold tissue, and patients of aggressive laryngeal growths and cancers where large sections of tissue must be removed to preserve the whole. Having the facility to grow and transplant vocal fold tissue, could potentially restore a patients ability to speak.
We have already transplanted an whole larynx into a patient, and now a small section of cultivated vocal fold tissue onto an external larynx. Couldn’t we just transplant a vocal fold? Yes we could, and this has been subjected to research, but it has limitations- donors being one. Being able to cultivate tissue could open up more possibilities including growing different size tissues for children and adults. Obviously we are a long way off this medical trial becoming a normal fixture in your local hospital- it has not yet been tested in a live human. However I am sure that the team will be working to progress this initial breakthrough as quickly and safely as possible.