Lab-grown bladders show promise
Published 9:00 pm Monday, April 3, 2006
Researchers said Monday that they have grown complete urinary bladders in a laboratory and transplanted them into patients, improving their health and achieving a Holy Grail of medicine: the first cultivation of working replacements for failing solid organs in people.
The “neo-bladders,” each one grown in a small laboratory container from a pinch of a patient’s own cells, have been working in seven young patients for an average of almost four years, according to a report released Monday by the British journal the Lancet. The organs have remained free of the many complications that bedevil the conventional practice of surgically constructing bladders from other tissues.
If ongoing studies continue apace, the researchers said, they hope someday to offer patients more than a dozen other homegrown organs, including blood vessel complexes, partial kidneys and perhaps hearts.
Experts applauded the work as a coming-of-age for the long-struggling field of tissue engineering and as a possible way to bypass some of the controversy over embryonic stem cells.
Because the replacement bladders were made from patients’ own cells, they did not trigger the body’s immune system.
The new study involved seven children, age 4 to 19, with spina bifida, a serious birth defect of the spinal cord. Because of misconnections in the nerves to the bladder, many such patients experience urinary pressure, causing life-threatening kidney damage.
