The Bladder Tissue Core (Core B) will be used by all three projects in the Urology Research Center.
The aim of the Bladder Tissue Core is to provide the program investigators with smooth muscle tissues from normal, obstructed and reversed rabbit bladders which have been characterized physiologically. It will also provide specimens from adult patients, with well-characterized symptoms of outlet obstruction, who are treated at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. In addition, protein extracts and RNA will be prepared from human and rabbit samples and distributed to various investigators for analyses. The Core will perform sham operations and surgery to produce partial outlet obstruction in rabbits, provide care for the animals postoperatively, obtain biopsies from bladders to monitor the degree of bladder smooth muscle hypertrophy and functional compensation, perform reversal surgery, sacrifice animals at appropriate time points, perform basic physiological characterization of the contractility of the bladder tissue, and distribute to the bladder tissues to the participating investigators. Physiological experiments will be performed with muscle strips to determine the ability of smooth muscle samples to produce force and with whole bladders to assess bladder emptying, since this property cannot be ascertained from isometric studies alone. Tissue samples will be either used immediately or frozen in liquid nitrogen for biochemical analysis or treatment with OCT for frozen sectioning for histology and immunohistochemistry and stored at -80 degrees Celsius for future use. All available information regarding the tissues at the time of distribution, or gathered subsequently from various projects in the Urology Research Center, will be logged onto a computer and made available to the investigators in the Center. Human detrusor smooth muscle tissues will be obtained from patients whose voiding dysfunction is clearly delineated based on urodynamic work-up and will be subdivided into those patients with low versus high post-void residual urine valves. Controls will be obtained from surgical specimens from non-cancerous regions of human bladder and from bladders of patient that have prostate cancers that did not produce an obstruction. Small muscle strips from human bladder tissue samples will be used for physiological studies to assess both the isometric force generating abilities as well as velocity of shortening. Additional human tissue will be frozen to allow for isolation of protein and RNA for correlation with physiologic studies. In studying a small number of well defined human bladder smooth muscle specimens, this core will help provide a crucial link between basic research findings and the clinical condition.
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