Free Republic

April 3, 2006 — The news is being hailed as a medical milestone: Several years after receiving new bladders engineered entirely in a laboratory, seven young patients are all still healthy. It marks the first long-term success of total-organ tissue regeneration, an area of medicine that until now was more the stuff of science fiction than clinical reality. Dr. Anthony Atala, the director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, reports in tomorrow's issue of the medical journal The Lancet on the success of the new procedure, which was performed on children born with...

Bladders created in the laboratory from a patient's own cells and then implanted in seven young people have achieved good long-term results in all of them, a team of researchers reported yesterday in a medical journal. It takes about two months to grow the new bladder on a scaffold outside the body. After implantation, the engineered bladder enlarges over time in the recipient. The researchers say they expect that the new bladder will last a patient's lifetime, but the longevity will be known only as the children grow older. The hope is that someday the experimental reconstruction procedure will be...