Sydney - Australian scientists said Thursday they had found a way for women who lose their breasts to cancer to re-grow them within a year.

Currently mastectomy patients have to wait years for taxpayer-funded breast implants or get by without them. The method offered as an alternative by the Bernard O'Brien Institute of Microsurgery in Melbourne is to insert breast-shaped chambers beneath the skin of the chest.

These are seeded with a woman's own fat cells and supplied with blood from a nearby blood vessel. The chambers dissolve after they have filled with re-grown breast tissue.

The regenerative procedure has been successfully tried on pigs and other animals and early next year will be trialled with women volunteers.

The institute's Phillip Marzella said there were two ways of stimulating the growth of fat cells.

"One is that nature abhors a vacuum so the chamber itself, because it's empty, it tends to be filled in by the body itself," he said. "The second approach we have also developed is a gel-like substance we can inject inside the chamber and that can also stimulate that growth."

The procedure could also allow women to grow bigger breasts, doing away with the need for implants.

What Marzella described as a "pretty major leap for regenerative surgery and medicine" could supercede implanting and breast reconstruction within three years.

"We are hoping to move on to other organs using the same principle - a chamber that protects and contains cells as they grow and they restore their normal function," he added. (dpa)