SEVEN youngsters spared a lifetime of incontinence and kidney
infections: that was the heartening outcome that tissue engineer
Anthony Atala was able to announce four years after
transplanting lab-grown bladders into people born with spina
bifida. It is a milestone, to be sure, but one that also shows
what a long road lies ahead for tissue engineering. Starting in
2002, Atala and his colleagues at Wake Forest University in
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, seeded sacs of collagen with
cells from the patients' own vestigial bladders, and then
cultured them for a couple of months before stitching the
artificial organs, piggy-back style, onto the patients' own. The
recipients are now doing reasonably well, but they are far from
fully continent, and some urologists have pointed out that
similar, if not better, results can be achieved using
conventional surgery. This involves grafting a section of small
intestine onto the bladder. From a tissue-engineering ... To
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