Back

A bioengineered human urothelial organoid model reveals the urine-urothelium interplay in tissue resilience and UPEC recurrence in urinary tract infections

Paduthol, G.; Nikolaev, M.; Sharma, K.; Blanc, J.; Tomasek, K.; Schlunke, L. I. E.; Borgeat, V.; Ambrosini, G.; Kolotuev, I.; Clerc-Rosset, S.; Gjorevski, N.; Knott, G. W.; Lütolf, M. P.; Thacker, V. V.; Mckinney, J. D.

2025-10-30 bioengineering
10.1101/2025.10.28.685030 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Urine is a dynamic and highly variable biofluid. Urine-urothelium interactions are a critical yet underexplored factor in bladder homeostasis and urinary tract infections (UTIs). Here, we report on a human mini-bladder model that exposes a stratified urothelium to urine of defined composition, and incorporates micturition. Prolonged exposure to high-solute concentration urine weakens tight junctions, dysregulates immune responses, and reduces bladder tissue resilience. This increases susceptibility to colonization of the bladder by uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) which reduces efficacy of antibiotic therapy. In high-solute concentration urine, Fosfomycin monotherapy - prescribed for uncomplicated UTIs, induces the formation of cell wall-deficient (CWD) UPEC in the urine (as observed in patients with recurrent UTIs) but also within deeper urothelial layers. Tissue-associated CWD UPEC directly contributed to recurrence. Our findings expand the conceptual role for CWD UPEC in UTIs, and demonstrate the power of the mini-bladder platform to capture urine-urothelial microenvironment dynamics that actively shape UTI pathogenesis and antibiotic tolerance.

Published in Nature Communications (predicted rank #1) · training set

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.