Building a solid organ like the liver in the lab is different and harder than with an organ like the bladder because solid organs are very vascular.

When a patient does get an organ from another person, it comes from a different body. It has different properties, and a person’s natural tendency is to reject that organ.

It was really uncharted territory in terms of how you do these things. We’re very pleased with how well they’re functioning.

This is a small, limited experience, but it has enough follow-up to show us that tissue engineering is a viable tool that will allow us to tackle problems of similar magnitude.

The body is the terminal incubator.

We have shown that regenerative medicine techniques can be used to generate functional bladders that are durable. This suggests that regenerative medicine may one day be a solution to the shortage of donor organs in...