Hi everyone!
I'm sure a lot of you have heard of Dr Anthony Atala and his bids to create penises to be transplanted onto humans using regenerative medical technologies, however how long do you expect it will be until this technique can be used for trans men?
I ask because not a lot of information about the timescale and progression is available online, or if it is I haven't found it yet unfortunately.
Thanks in advance! :)
It really I think depends on a lot of factors. It's not just a simple A to B point thing.
First and foremost his work was funded in order to help cismales such as soldiers who had lost their genitals or men who had accidents or birth defects and so on.
So if they even get to human trials, those men have first dibs which could take years into trials before anything actually came out of that.
Then there would be the issue of funding such things. I haven't heard anything actually recent since his first published article on it in 2006. It's already now been 8 years with as far as I could find, nothing else mentioned after the rabbit study. Funding is a massive factor. If the government pulls the funding, a private investor would have to step in and the chances of that are really up in the air.
Even with funding there's still mounds of paperwork to even get approved for human trials. Which can take many years, a lot of funding to further research that might need to be done in order to get approved and so on.
To top it all of, the leap from trial to clinical and available to general public is also painstaking long and very expensive. Say somehow all of this is pushed and done and ready in the next 10 years, it would be extremely expensive and insurance companies might tell you for the next 5 years after it comes out that it would actually be cheaper to go with the surgeries available today unless you pay x amount extra to get the grown penis ect.
So realistically? You're looking at 10 years if not a bit more. It reallllyyy has a lot of factors to play into things like this and money is one of the main things that is going to hold this back unless it gets priority funding from the government.
Yeah it is an extremely lengthy process, and the lack of updates really does worry me as to whether or not it'll ever get done, but as long as some progress is made, America hopefully won't pull funding :)
I could deal with waiting for 10 years, maybe even 15, as long as I could have hope that I'd get it one day - and I would be eternally grateful :')
Thanks for the reply :)
Once the procedure has been successful with cis men. Trials will then need to be donewith transmen since the lower anatomy is different to attach the new penis. How long and where the funds will come from for these trials is complete unknown at this time.
No problem FtMaster. I also am more than happy to wait a while if progress looks to be happening so I'm right there with you. Just crossing fingers at this point.
Thanks for your replies you guys :)
Only time will tell but I hope that in a few years time this will be an option for all trans men wanting bottom surgery, fingers crossed as you said c:
If I ever get rich, I'll fund it :D