# A Durable and Urine-Leakage Resistive Tissue Engineered Urinary Diversion

> **NIH NIH R21** · JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $204,688

## Abstract

Project Summary:
Bladder cancer patients with locally advanced disease often need their bladder removed to effectively treat
their cancer. Additionally, there are a number of benign disease conditions, including congenital abnormalities,
spinal cord injury, and neurogenic bladders that need tissue and organ replacement. An acute shortage of
organ donation, challenges associated with the immune-suppression, and short and long-term health
complications encountered in applications of non-native tissues, make the problem worse. With the current
gold-standard surgical procedure that utilizes gastrointestinal (GI) tract, namely the ileum to create a urinary
diversion or neo-bladder, patients are prone to many health complications, including chronic infections and
kidney disease, due to the inherent absorptive and secretory properties of GI tract. In order to reduce the
significant morbidity that results from utilization of the alimentary tract, tissue-engineered urinary diversions are
highly desirable. Despite the proven feasibility and promises in pre-clinical models, clinical translations of
tissue engineered neo-urinary organs to patients have been critically limited and largely unsuccessful due to
urine leakage and contracture of the implant. To overcome this major limitation, we, therefore, propose to
create a new collagen-based urinary diversion that is uniquely compliant yet strong and suturable, which has a
urine-leakage resistive polymer coated engineered urothelium substitute. Since, the composition of urinary
tissue directly dictates its urodynamic response, we hypothesize that by increasing the entropy of the collagen
network by creating sliding crosslinking sites we can account for both the tissue-compliance and tensile
strength of the biomaterial construct. We further hypothesize that an engineered urine-protecting layer of
negatively charged polysaccharides on an urothelium substitute will protect the regenerating stroma from urine
that is otherwise known to cause many undesirable clinical conditions, including urinary infections, stone
formation, failure of the graft, and even deaths in some cases.
 The findings of the proposed study will advance our understanding of the influence of material composition,
compliance and urine-leakage on the functional ability of regenerated urinary tissues. We anticipate our
research findings can be translated into clinical applications in 3-5 years and it will have a huge impact on
patient’s post-operative quality of life and recovery from the bladder removal surgery.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9915914
- **Project number:** 5R21EB026711-03
- **Recipient organization:** JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Anirudha Singh
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $204,688
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-08-15 → 2021-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9915914

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9915914, A Durable and Urine-Leakage Resistive Tissue Engineered Urinary Diversion (5R21EB026711-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9915914. Licensed CC0.

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