Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Injury, inflammation, tumor, congenital malformation and other reasons often cause serious defects in the lower urinary tract. There are many disadvantages of lower urinary tract reconstruction using conventional surgery. Tissue engineering technology can construct tissue engineered organs with acellular matrix and biomaterial scaffold, which exploits a new therapeutic approach for clinical reconstruction of lower urinary tract.
OBJECTIVE: To review the application of tissue engineering technology in male low urinary system reconstruction and to point out its shortcomings.
METHODS: PubMed and CNKI databases were searched using key words of “tissue engineering, urethra engineering, bladder, urethra, testicle” from January 1994 to June 2009. Totally 72 literatures were initial searched, and 29 documents were included in the further analysis.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Two kinds of models were used in vesical construction, that is, acellular matrix model and composite scaffolds with seeded cells model. The acellular matrix scaffold comprised vesical extracellular matrix, urethra extracellular matrix and small intestinal submucosa, etc. In composite scaffolds with seeded cells, seed cells were incubated into scaffolds, and implanted into bodies after certain treatment. Application of urethra tissue engineering was similar to that of bladder. But testis tissue engineering is just at the sprout stage. Presently, the tissue engineered “substitute” is not comparable to natural tissues.