Tissue Engineering of Urinary Bladder and Urethra: Advances from Bench to Patients
Figure 6
Production of a vesical equivalent by the self-assembly technique. Vesical equivalent reconstruction can be divided in two major steps. (a) Upper panel: deposition of extracellular matrix to create a manipulatable sheet followed by seeding of urothelial cells. (b) Middle panel: proliferation and differentiation of urothelial cells using a specially designed bioreactor. Bioreactor mimics filling and emptying phases of the bladder. Note that under pressure, vesical equivalent adopts a concave form. (c) Lower panel: self-assembly technique allows production of human reconstructed endothelialized vesical equivalent. (A) Masson’s trichrome staining of a slice from a native porcine bladder. (B) Masson’s trichrome staining of a slice from a human reconstructed vesical equivalent.
