Concise Review: Tissue Engineering of Urinary Bladder; We Still Have a Long Way to Go?

Regenerative medicine is a new branch of medicine based on tissue engineering technology. This rapidly developing field of science offers revolutionary treatment strategy aimed at urinary bladder regeneration. Despite many promising announcements of experimental urinary bladder reconstruction, there has been a lack in commercialization of therapies based on current investigations. This is due to numerous obstacles that are slowly being identified and precisely overcome. The goal of this review is to present the current status of research on urinary bladder regeneration and highlight further challenges that need to be gradually addressed. We put an emphasis on expectations of urologists that are awaiting tissue engineering based solutions in clinical practice. This review also presents a detailed characteristic of obstacles on the road to successful urinary bladder regeneration from urological clinician perspective. A defined interdisciplinary approach might help to accelerate planning transitional research tissue engineering focused on urinary tracts. Stem Cells Translational Medicine 2017;6:2033-2043.