If couples are unable to have children, adhesions in the woman's fallopian tubes are one of the possible causes of an unfulfilled desire to have children. It is then very difficult for the egg and sperm to move towards each other through the fallopian tube - and pregnancy often fails to occur.
Researchers from Rostock and Greifswald are now testing a solution to the problem in the fallopian tube: a stent. This tiny tube is known as a support for blocked blood vessels. The small technical miracle has a diameter of around one millimeter and is two centimeters long. A very open design of the stent - the individual cells of the stent are open-pored - allows the small "cilia", which are part of the fallopian tube, to settle on the stent to ensure transport of the fertilized egg through the stent in the fallopian tube. This is because fallopian tubes are more complex than vessels in the heart, for example. The stent developed in Warnemünde consists of a polymer, a plastic approved for medical products, which is made up of macromolecules.
The prototype is already finished. It was developed by Dr. Paula Rosam, a medical doctor, and Ariane Dierke, an engineer for biomedical technology. Both conduct research at the Warnemünde Institute for Implant Technology and Biomaterials (IIB e.V.). Finja Borowski is also a member of the research team. As a mechanical engineer at the IIB, she deals with fluid mechanics issues relating to the heart and contributes her ideas and experience from other research areas to the project. The IIB e.V. is an affiliated institute of the University of Rostock, which has made a name for itself internationally with the development of stents under the leadership of Professor Klaus-Peter Schmitz. The basic idea for the development of a fallopian tube stent was developed as part of the BMBF project RESPONSE under the management of Andrea Bock, Managing Director of the IIB.
Source: Wolfgang Thiel/University of Rostock
