Jiffy Boobs

For post-treatment breast-cancer patients who have had partial mastectomies followed by radiation, artificial materials may not even be an option. Because radiated tissue usually can't tolerate implants, patients either have to live with the altered breast, or in some cases they can have a flap of skin, muscle and fat taken from someplace else in the body. But that leaves scarring and may not be a realistic option for women who have only had a small part of the breast excised.  There are about 300,000 new cases of breast cancer being diagnosed every year in Europe and about 213,000 cases in the United States. A large portion of those women will have either lumpectomies or partial mastectomies.

Those are precisely the patients that Cytori's new technology is designed for. "We wanted to focus on the unmet medical needs of women who've had the terrible diagnosis of breast cancer. There are millions of women who haven't had any real reconstructive option," says Hedrick.
 
But for Cytori's technique to be reimbursable by either insurance or government programs in Europe or the U.S., the company says it needs clinical evidence that doctors can actually put the technique into practice in the operating room in a safe and viable way. The process, which Cytori calls "celution," involves a device that extracts regenerative and stem cells from fat that has been removed via liposuction from the belly or thighs. Those cells are then mixed back in with regular fat and the new "supercharged," and hopefully more viable, fat can be injected into an area that needs filling out. 

The company has gotten approval in the European Union for the system that does the turbo-charging, but it is still awaiting the results of clinical trials to make the push for commercial applications. Cytori points to early successes in a November 2006 Japanese study of 11 women who were injected with the supercharged fat to restore breast tissue after partial mastectomies. In addition, they have recently launched a 36-patient double-blind, placebo-controlled study in Spain.  A spokesman says the company has spent seven years and about $100 million developing the stem-cell-extracting technology--including a $45 million investment from the imaging-technology manufacturer Olympus, which will help produce the device if it goes into wider use in 2009, as hoped.

Henrick admits that while the current focus of 'celution' is cancer patients and heart-disease patients (the technique has also shown promise in reviving damaged heart muscle), the company can't help but look ahead at the lucrative cosmetic market. Last year there were more than 329,000 breast- enlargement procedures in the United States, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.  "There will certainly be enormous cosmetic opportunities later on, he says.  "For instance, there may be women who would never consider a silicone implant, but might consider this."

Baker's team at Georgetown University is pursuing another intriguing and potentially less invasive method of fat grafting.   Researchers were looking into a neurochemical pathway that stimulates fat growth and plays a role in obesity. They found that Neuropeptide Y (NPY) rises in stressed mice, accelerating the growth of fat and promoting the blood vessels necessary to sustain fat tissue.  By blocking the receptors for NPY they could prevent the stressed mice from gaining fat even if they were fed a high-fat diet--and could even reduce fat deposits by 40 to 50 percent in a matter of weeks. 

 Baker looked at that research and wondered whether the process could work the other way. Was it possible to get fat to grow if you stimulated NPY? The answer was yes--at least in mice where they were able to produce a halo of fat in a targeted area. But will the technique work in humans? Baker says it has great potential because the NPY receptors in mice are very similar to that of humans--and because the fat that they grew in the mice was human fat.  "Everyone is talking about the stress factor and fat, but if we are able to add fat via injections without doing surgery, and if 99 percent of it stays, that will be the really big news in five or 10 years," says Baker.