The Verge notes:

The traditional treatment for women with MRKH involves reconstructive surgery or painful dilation procedures. These interventions can be quite traumatic — they have a complication rate of 75 percent in pediatric patients — so researchers wanted to find a way to avoid them altogether. That’s why they set out to engineer vaginas, described in a study published in The Lancet today that would be compatible with each patient.

The vaginas are made from human cells removed from the women’s genital areas.

Anthony Atala, a urologist at Wake Forest University who conducted the trials, and his team took “a very small piece of tissue from the patient, less than half the size of a postage stamp, and we then teased the cells apart and grew the cells separately.”

The enlarged cells were attached to a biodegradable scaffold fashioned to look like a vagina best-suited to each patient.

Six weeks later, the women had their vagina’s sewn onto their reproductive structures. The hope was that the patients’ nerves and blood vessels would bind to the new tissue. It worked. The scaffolding was absorbed. The vagina remains. Atala writes:

“We now show up to an 8-year follow-up with those organs showing functionality.”

But not full functionality: the women can achieve orgasm through sex but not give birth.

And, yes, men, you may soon never need to go out again…