Cranberry Township woman’s engineering background aids bladder research
Driving innovation
CRANBERRY TWP — Despite majoring in engineering, a Cranberry Township woman took on a health-related project when applying to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh and found herself excelling in doing the research, so much so that a science journal has published her work.
Fatemeh Azari, a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, has been published in “Nature Portfolio,” an international weekly journal of science first published in 1869. Her article “Elucidating the high compliance mechanism by which the urinary bladder fills under low pressures,” is the product of years of research at Pitt, which involved studying rat bladders to see how they reacted to different circumstances.
According to Azari, the project is scheduled to take place over five years. Research began in 2021. She said the article presented some new findings on the inner workings of the bladder and it was well-received by the people who reviewed it for publication.
“In the science field, ‘Nature’ is one of the biggest reputable publishers of science articles... and their reviewers actually gave a lot of positive comments which is kind of rare,” Azari said. “The people who reviewed my article, they were basically very impressed by the novelty of the experiment setups and the methods that we did, with multiple imaging and CT scans.”
The project is funded by a grant from National Institutes of Health and was pitched to look at how prostate enlargement impacts bladder functionality over time, Azari said.
While that was the initial pitch for the grant funding Azari’s position and research at Pitt, the research can and has evolved when new findings are unveiled in the testing. Azari explained she has been using microscopes to look inside the rat bladders as they fill with special fluid, an integral part of the research.
“I basically fill up these rat bladders with some sort of blue fluids that you can see contrasting with tissue that is white and how the shape changes as it pressurizes. I have all these cameras that are recording the pressure and the images,” she said. “They are basically able to look at these on a microscopic level and be able to tell what is happening inside it.”
Anne Robertson, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Pittsburgh, is Azari’s overseeing professor. She said the bladder is an organ that has gone “understudied” in higher education, and the research and experiments she and Azari are doing now are relatively new to that area of study.
“Fatemeh was looking at the whole bladder as a whole organ — scientists were looking at it in pieces,” Robertson said. “People didn't even know how the bladder didn't flow under low pressure. The fact that a healthy bladder can expand and fill slowly. Somehow, it is able to fill up and look like a balloon even under low pressures.”
Robertson previously studied brain aneurysms and found that the tools her team used for that research could be implemented for bladder study as well. She said to even have a proposal approved by the National Institutes of Health is rare and to have a paper published within a few years of the study is also pretty uncommon. The grant is providing $3.2 million to the project, which must be used within five years, Robertson said.
Azari joining the project has helped make it successful, Robertson said, and she even credited her with being the one who came up with the system of research that helped get the study published.
“She built this system of cameras to image the bladder while it was being inflated,” Robertson said of Azari. “We want to understand what is happening with the wall of the bladder, understand how the bladder builds up until it is no longer optimal. Her work was important in understanding the build up in the bladder.”
As an engineer, Azari has also implemented computer programming and 3D modeling into the study. Other students are working on other elements of the study, some of which lean toward biological knowledge compared to Azari’s area of expertise.
“I'm the person who is responsible for intact organ testing and there are other researchers who basically harvest a piece of the tissue, cut it up and put it under a microscope,” Azari said. “Although it's very biological and medical-related, because we use mechanical engineering tools... more expertise comes from purely engineering, but we have all these other collaborators to basically verify that what the engineer says actually happens in the body and makes sense.”
According to Azari, her study aims to understand how the bladder reacts to different variables and come up with potential treatments that can be tested later.
According to Robertson, the findings of the study may eventually be applied in medical treatment, although that kind of impact would still be years away.
“In men, when the prostate is enlarged it makes it so the bladder has to contract harder to get out of that small outlet,” Robertson said. “Like arteries, it's made up of collagen. It's really analogous to the heart and that's what we tried to study is, ‘what does this bladder do when obstructed?’”
Azari summarized the results of her experiments and research in her article for “Nature.” She said language used in scientific journals like “Nature,” gets pretty technical, but explained her job was to sum up the research and the method behind it. The reviewers for the publication judged the article based on her presentation of the facts.
“We were fortunate to have these experts and their names on the article basically proves that we are reliable,” Azari said. “I'm very excited to publish in such a prestigious scientific outlet and I'm hoping our next papers will also be published that we are working on.”
Robertson commented that Azari’s paper probably stood out to the reviewers at “Nature” because “it was answering questions that were not thought of before.”
“I think it's really remarkable how much a talented student can contribute starting with no knowledge on the topic and is making top-level contributions to the field in a relatively short amount of time,” Robertson said.
So far, Azari’s article has been accessed more than 1,000 times. She will also present some of her research at a clinical conference next year in Washington, D.C.
With nearly three years left in the research project, Azari said she hopes to complete thorough research into bladder obstruction to have a clear picture of reasons behind issues that cause issues in men.
Robertson predicted her research team makes it to a point of research where solutions to bladder obstruction are tested.
“We are testing drugs to reverse some of the problems and we are also trying to understand what are the conditions of reversing this process that the body can actually recover,” Robertson said. “We probably are going to publish three or four papers a year now.”
