As humans, our lips are very important.
From the moment you are born, they help you create suction for feeding. As you grow up, you’ll use them to keep food in your mouth when you eat, and use them to form words so that you can communicate.
You might learn to play an instrument: lips are vital for flutes, trumpets, bassoons.
They’re also a vital interpersonal tool: beyond just speaking, we use them to portray our mood too, with a smile or a frown telling those around us as much about how we feel as our words do.
Perhaps most pleasantly, the lips are key to the perfect kiss, whether it’s your first kiss, the kiss that seals your marital vows, or a tiny kiss delicately planted on your baby’s forehead.
But what happens if, for whatever reason, your lips become damaged? As much as we might not like to admit it, people can be fickle. If someone has a lip disfigurement, they might feel that it holds them back in life.
So how can this delicate skin be fixed?
This was the question facing researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland, as they worked through processes in their labs to develop treatments for devastating lip injuries.
Why? Because lip cells are difficult to grow and replicate. The skin on our lips is both delicate, and the bearer of an incredible number of nerve endings. Lips are really sensitive to touch and temperature, with both having important evolutionary properties; it’s also pretty rare for lip cells to be donated to labs, as the researchers explain in a statement:
“The skin on our lips is distinctly different and more complex than other skin on our bodies, and primary lip cells are hard to acquire, which holds back basic research that could help improve treatments for painful and complicated lip conditions.”
Previously, researchers had to rely on cells that had been obtained from the patient or another donor; because lip tissue is so different from other kinds of bodily tissue, specific lip cells are required for lip research. But think about it: on your organ donation form, where does it say “donate my lips”? It doesn’t. Therefore, lip cells are difficult for researchers to obtain – and when they are donated, they don’t last forever and can only be replicated so many times.
However, a team of scientists – led by Dr Martin Degen from the University of Bern – have used donated lip tissue to create cell lines. These can be regrown over and over again, allowing researchers in this area to make 3D models that will help them to research lips further, as well as create and test repairs for lip conditions and injuries.
The research, which was published in the academic journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology is groundbreaking in its potential to help improve the lives of lip injury and disfigurement patients worldwide, as Dr Degen explains in the statement:
“The lip is a very prominent feature of our face. Any defects in this tissue can be highly disfiguring. But until now, human lip cell models for developing treatments were lacking. With our strong collaboration with the University Clinic for Pediatric Surgery, Bern University Hospital, we were able to change that, using lip tissue that would have been discarded otherwise.”
These lip cells were donated by two patients currently undergoing treatment. One of the patients had a devastating lip injury, while the other had a cleft lip. These are the two most common lip conditions requiring treatment, and thus the focus of the scientists’ efforts.
They genetically modified the donated lip cells to stop them from degenerating and to extend their replication. This meant that, unlike previous work on lip cells, these cells would keep reproducing and not die away in the lab.
Uncontrolled or unceasing cell replication can, of course, be a cancer risk: so the researchers observed the replication of the lip cells to ensure that they did not mutate or become cancerous. After confirming that the cells remained stable, they were able to use the cells to help develop treatments for lip conditions.
In their testing, they found that the cells would be appropriate for the creation of 3D models to help doctors treat individual lip injuries. This is because they found that, like regular lip cells, they healed from minor wounds in eight hours or less, and responded to infections in just the same way as lip cells in a regular human body.
With these cells continuing to replicate and respond well to testing, the researchers have broken new ground on the treatment for not only cleft lips but lip injuries too, as Dr Degen explains:
“Our laboratory focuses on obtaining a better knowledge of the genetic and cellular pathways involved in cleft lip and palate. However, we are convinced that 3D models established from healthy immortalized lip cells have the potential to be very useful in many other fields of medicine.”
This is great news for smiles worldwide.
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