COLLEGE PARK, Md — A researcher at the University of Maryland has created 3D lab-grown uterine fibroids to study how they form and develop less invasive treatment options.
Dr. Erika Moore has spent the last three years battling pain and discomfort from uterine fibroids — and that personal experience is now driving her research.
"For me it started with these weird symptoms like I felt pressure, pelvic pressure a little bit of abnormal bleeding you know around the time that I menstrate," Moore said.
A University of Maryland professor is growing lab-made fibroids to find better, less invasive treatments for millions of women.
When the pressure became too strong to bear, Moore went to her doctor and was diagnosed with uterine fibroids.
"So one of my fibroids is the size of a decent sized plum and the other ones are grapes that are kind of scattered around my uterus," Moore said.
There are only a few ways to treat fibroids, all of which involve some type of surgery.
"I started finding that there weren't a lot of options that are not really invasive," Moore said.
"Removing the uterus is the only clinical option available right now for most of the women that have fibroids that keep growing," Moore said.
So Moore came up with a way to research fibroids outside of the human body.
"Unless someone is literally in my body taking a biopsy at every single stage of my fibroid development, we have no idea how they form or why they form and so for me and my group we have the power to actually engineer different tissues to build these jello models to understand why you know certain diseases occur and so it was kind of this aha moment where I was like why don't we put the expertise that I have together with a solution that affects almost 80 percent of women to figure out what fibroids even develop in the first place," Moore said.
These first-of-their-kind 3D lab-grown fibroids give Moore and her team the chance to study each phase of fibroid growth and test ways of destroying them while preserving healthy tissue.
"So that way ideally you wouldn't have to have the big surgery you could just take something in a pill or deliver it topically or directly to the fibroid and have that kind of start regression of the fibroid," Moore said.
So far, Moore and her team have been able to halt the growth of fibroids, but they are still working to completely eliminate them. She says in order to do that, they have to focus their attention on finding the source of fibroids.
"There are so many women and people who are impacted by fibroids and now that we can all kind of join this chorus its like this beautiful choir right where were all singing like this is a problem, we need more people to help out. So to have any part in contributing to eventual solutions I feel like is a privilege," Moore said.
As she seeks to create a non-invasive treatment for fibroids, Moore says she is still dealing with symptoms from her own condition.
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