Personalized 3D printed scaffolds: The ethical aspects

Personalized 3D printed scaffolds are a new generation of implants for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine purposes. Scaffolds support cell growth, providing an artificial extracellular matrix for tissue repair and regeneration and can biodegrade once cells have assumed their physiological and structural roles. The ethical challenges and opportunities of these implants should be mapped in parallel with the life cycle of the scaffold to assist their development and implementation in a responsible, safe, and ethically sound manner. This article provides an overview of these relevant ethical aspects. We identified nine themes which were linked to three stages of the life cycle of the scaffold: the development process, clinical testing, and the implementation process. The described ethical issues are related to good research and clinical practices, such as privacy issues concerning digitalization, first-in-human trials, responsibility and commercialization. At the same time, this article also creates awareness for underexplored ethical issues, such as irreversibility, embodiment and the ontological status of these scaffolds. Moreover, it exemplifies how to include gender in the ethical assessment of new technologies. These issues are important for responsible development and implementation of personalized 3D printed scaffolds and in need of more attention within the additive manufacturing and tissue engineering field. Moreover, the insights of this review reveal unresolved qualitative empirical and normative questions that could further deepen the understanding and co-creation of the ethical implications of this new generation of implants.

Women's Experiences of and Perspectives on Transvaginal Mesh Surgery for Stress Urine Incontinency and Pelvic Organ Prolapse: A Qualitative Systematic Review

Background

Trans Vaginal Mesh (TVM) surgeries have been used to treat stress urine incontinency (SUI) and/or pelvic organ prolapse (POP). Systematic reviews of clinical studies of outcomes suggest that the procedures have benefited a majority of women, while noting that a small minority of women have experienced harms. To provide a more complete picture of outcomes, we conducted a systematic review of the qualitative literature to provide a comprehensive analysis of women’s own accounts of their experience.

Method

We conducted a systematic review and thematic synthesis of the evidence from the international qualitative literature on women’s experiences of and perspectives on TVM surgery for SUI and/or POP between 1996 and 2020. We retrieved 6587 papers from PubMed, Cochrane, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Sociological Abstracts. After application of inclusion and exclusion criteria and full-text review of eligible articles, five articles were included in our systematic review.

Results

Findings from included articles were organised under three main themes: women’s everyday lives were transformed by TVM surgery; women’s expectations of and approach to their future lives; and women’s critiques of TVM surgery. The transformation of women’s everyday lives included a struggle to obtain recognition and support for their injuries before and after corrective surgery, ongoing limitations on their social, professional and personal lives, and compounding medical and psychological trauma as a result. Women’s approaches to their future lives changed because of this transformation; we identified five main approaches, four were ways of accommodating change, a fifth involved being unable to accommodate life changes. Women’s critiques included that TVM surgeries were overused, consent processes were poor, and surgeons’ definitions of success were deficient. Women expressed concerns about the safety of TVM products and future risks of further complications and discussed multiple system failures in the health care they received.

Conclusion

This review suggests that discounting women’s experiences has caused compound trauma and skewed the clinical evidence base; while harms occurred in a minority of women, we suggest they should be recognised as an ethically significant potential outcome. Approaches to TVM injury should attend to historical epistemic injustice and recognise women’s agency.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40271-021-00547-7.

Transvaginal mesh, gender and the ethics of clinical innovation

On 10 October 2018, Australian Health Minister Greg Hunt issued a national apology to the Australian women who experienced 'horrific outcomes' following surgery using transvaginal mesh-acknowledging the 'historic agony and pain that has come from mesh implantation'. This apology followed many decades of 'innovative' use of transvaginal mesh for the treatment of pelvic organ prolapse. We use the case of transvaginal mesh to explore how clinical innovation may not only harm patients, but also entrench vulnerability and exacerbate existing inequities-in this case, those relating to gender.