Most Oklahomans enjoy gardening, and good gardeners know that the right plant can be propagated by harvesting a branch or root.

At the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Brad Kropp, MD, a pediatric urologist with OU Physicians and H.K. Lin, PhD, an assistant professor of urology, are doing much the same thing for human organs, specifically the bladder.

“You don’t need a bladder to live; but to live a productive and socially acceptable life, a bladder is nice to have,” Kropp said as he explained the science of regenerative medicine.

Kropp and Lin both believe regenerative medicine is the future of medicine. It involves the process of taking tissue biopsies from organs, re-growing them in the laboratory and then delivering them back to the person. The process would help eliminate one of the major concerns in transplants – the risk that the transplant will be rejected by the body.

“It is a form of transplantation, but you don’t need any immunosuppressant (drugs) because you’re growing organs from the original organ source,” Kropp said. “So, if you lost your bladder to a congenital anomaly or potential bladder cancer, we could save a few cells, and we only need a small amount of them, and then we can grow a brand new bladder for you. Then, I could give it back to you so you’d have a new bladder for the future.”

The future of regenerative medicine means that someday scientists may be able to grow replacements for a variety of damaged, diseased or missing tissue or organs, he said.

“We are currently focusing on bladder regeneration,” Lin said of the research. “So we are trying to make the tissue outside the body; then take it to the surgeon and have him put it back into the human body. In that way, we can hopefully make the bladder functional.”

Lin is working with molecular biology techniques that he said may allow the team to alter cells in the laboratory. The importance, he explained, is that their lab was the first to show that if the patient has only diseased or abnormal cells to start with, the cells grown in the lab will also be abnormal.

“So therefore we may be creating a bigger, ‘badder’ bladder,” Kropp explained, “instead of a bigger, better one.”

The goal now for Kropp, Lin and their team is to utilize molecular biology and cutting-edge techniques to alter the abnormal cells and make them normal before growing new cells.

“We are one of two major laboratories in the United States of America that are researching bladder and urology and tissue engineering,” he said. “The other lab is in North Carolina. We are one of the two major centers in the world that work on tissue engineering for the urinary bladder.”

Kropp and Lin’s work has not been without difficulties. Kropp said he started the research in 1990 and thought it would move quickly from bench to bedside, but then they began to encounter problems they had not anticipated.

“It was kind of like the Lewis and Clark expedition,” Kropp explained. “They set out and said ‘You know we’re going over this pass and we’ll be at the Pacific Ocean.’ They didn’t understand there were going to be problems, and that’s kind of what happened to us.”

Since 1996, Kropp said he and his team have overcome several major hurdles. He now believes development of a fully, tissue-engineered bladder may be only five or ten years away.

Kropp added the obstacles they overcome in their work in urology at the OU Health Sciences Center can also be applied to other organ systems, bringing hope to even more potential transplant patients. And within our lifetime, he predicts science may allow us to manufacture a variety of replacement parts for humans.