New Northwestern Medicine research has found an innovative method of rebuilding bladder tissue using patient's own healthy bone marrow cells, reports Medical Xpress.
In the new study led by author Arun K. Sharma, research assistant professor in urology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and his team, used the bone marrow cells in order to regenerate the bladder's smooth muscle, vasculature, and nerve tissue, says the report.
"We are manipulating a person's own disease-free cells for bladder tissue reformation," said Sharma, a member of the Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine and the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago Research Center, reports Medical Xpress. "We have used the spina bifida patient population as a proof of concept model because those patients typically have bladder dysfunction. However, this regeneration approach could be used for people suffering from a variety of bladder issues where the bone marrow microenvironment is deemed normal."
The standard surgical treatment involved in neurogenic bladder disease, an illness where a patient's ability to pass urine is dysfunctional due to the nerves carrying messages from the bladder to the brain being disrupted, is 'augmentation cystoplasty' or 'bladder augmentation. This requires a surgical process of taking stripes of tissues from the patient's bowel (intestinal tract) and adding to the bladder, increasing the size of it. This surgery, however, involves risk of long term complications resulting in the development of diseases like electrolyte imbalance and bladder cancer in certain cases.
The study had a breakthrough in regenerating the bladder tissue without using the intestinal tract tissues, which reduces the long-term risks involved in bladder augmentation. Sharma's technique is a combination of using stem and progenitor cells from the patient's bone marrow and using a synthetic scaffold, which is used as an alternate to bowel tissue patch. The synthetic scaffold is developed in the laboratory of Guillermo Ameer, ScD, professor of biomedical engineering at McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
"We decided to use material that has the ability to be tailored to simulate mechanical properties of the bladder," said Sharma, director of pediatric urological regenerative medicine at Lurie Children's. "Using the elastomer created by Dr. Ameer and the bone marrow stem and progenitor cells, I believe that we have developed a technique that can potentially be used in lieu of current bladder augmentation procedures. However, further study is needed."
These findings are also published in an online journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 18.
