Urothelial Cell Culture Behavior in Fibrin Glue Compared to Conventional Culture Medium

Abstract

The modern field of tissue engineering has now successfully established cell cultures for nearly every tissue type of the human body including urothelium [1]. The next big step for a sophisticated defect repair using this technology is to overcome the problems of cell reimplantation. Only few reports in the literature describe reimplantation of urothelial cell cultures [2,3]. A proven and successful graft take for reconstructive purposes is missing because simple reimplantation into the organism and integration through revascularisation as used in skin grafts or ceratinocytes sheets has consistently failed in case of urothelial cells. The reasons, however, remain unclear. The highly differentiated cell type and the specific membrane protein complexes may require a special delivery vehicle. Such a delivery vehicle should contain several important features including high levels of biocompatibility and biodegradibility, less cytotoxity, and a high affinity to bind to biological surfaces. Encouraged by several reports of successful autologous cell transplantations using fibrin glue as a vehicle for different tissue types and the useful application of fibrin glue as a culture medium, we have investigated the cell behavior of urothelial cell cultures in fibrin glue as compared to conventional medium [4,5]. According to our current research protocols, we tested the urothelial cell cultures taken from rats to grow in fibrin glue. H&E histology, electron microscopy, immunhistochemical examination and flow cytometric were used to evaluate the phenotypic cell expression and cell proliferation rates.