Penises grown in laboratories could soon be tested on men by scientists developing technology to help people with congenital abnormalities, or who have undergone surgery for aggressive cancer or suffered traumatic injury. Researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are assessing engineered penises for safety, function and durability. They hope to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and to move to human testing within five years.

The penises would be grown using a patient's own cells to avoid the high risk of immunological rejection after organ transplantation from another individual. Cells taken from the remainder of the patient's penis would be grown in culture for four to six weeks. For the structure, they wash a donor penis in a mild detergent to remove all donor cells. After two weeks a collagen scaffold of the penis is left, on to which they seed the patient's cultured cells – smooth muscle cells first, then endothelial cells, which line the blood vessels. Because the method uses a patient's own penis-specific cells, the technology will not be suitable for female-to-male sex reassignment surgery.