How the surfaces of silicone breast implants affect the immune system

Every year, about 400,000 people receive silicone breast implants in the United States. According to data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a majority of those implants needs to be replaced within 10 years due to the buildup of scar tissue and other complications.

A team led by MIT researchers has now systematically analyzed how the varying surface architecture found in these implants influences the development of adverse effects, which in rare cases can include an unusual type of lymphoma. “The surface topography of an implant can drastically affect how the immune response perceives it, and this has important ramifications for the [implants’] design,” says Omid Veiseh, a former MIT postdoc. The findings could help scientists to design more biocompatible implants in the future, the researchers say.

After performing their animal studies, the researchers analyzed samples from a large bank of cancer tissue samples at MD Anderson to study how human patients respond to different types of silicone breast implants. In those samples, the researchers found evidence for the same types of immune responses that they had seen in the animal studies. Among their findings, they observed that tissue samples that had been host to highly textured implants for many years showed signs of a chronic, long-term immune response. They also found that scar tissue was thicker in patients who had more highly textured implants.

Read more at MIT

Image Credit: Felice Frankel

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