An examination of regenerative medicine-based strategies for the urinary bladder

Patients that are afflicted with dysfunctional urinary bladders due to developmental defect, trauma or malignant transformation have limited treatment options that would allow for complete recapitulation of the urinary bladder. Hence, novel tissue engineering techniques that are successful in regenerating functional urinary bladder tissue for replacement therapy would be invaluable. Current tissue engineering techniques are hampered by several problems including choice of appropriate cell type, inadequate development of new blood vessels to the regenerated tissue, tissue innervation and primitive bioscaffold design. This article describes the recent advances in stem cell biology and the material sciences to address these problems, and attempts to improve upon current tissue engineering techniques to make successful regeneration of urinary bladder tissue a reality.