ESPERANZADOR:

Inside the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s spacious new headquarters here, when asked how many siblings he has, Anthony Atala gives a long gentle laugh instead of a reply.

Just to have shared that he was born in Peru and comes from a large family is more than he normally divulges about his personal life to journalists. But asked about his work with urothelial cells — the cells that line the bladder, ureter and urethra — Dr. Atala bends forward and talks a blue streak. Which might be expected of a urologist and tissue engineer who grows, from scratch, fully functioning bladders.

In April, when the two-year-old institute that Dr. Atala directs for Wake Forest’s School of Medicine moved into some 50,000 square feet of space in the Piedmont Triad Research Park, it became one of the world’s largest research facilities dedicated to regenerative medicine, a practice that aims to refurbish diseased or damaged tissue using the body’s own healthy cells.

The field of tissue engineering is large in this endeavor, with researchers like Dr. Atala exploring a basic approach. To repair or replace parts, they seed a biodegradable scaffold with cells and insert it into the body, where the cells, if all goes smoothly, mature into functioning tissue.

At the institute, he and more than 80 colleagues are working on tissue replacement projects for practically every body part — blood vessels and nerves, muscles, cartilage and bones, esophagus and trachea, pancreas, kidneys, liver, heart and even uterus.

In the long term, the scientists hope, patients may no longer have to wait on the national transplant list “for someone to die so they can live,” as Dr. Atala puts it. Organs could be tailor-made for people.

A more immediate goal is to improve upon a multitude of smaller therapies: transplantable valves for ailing hearts, cell-and-gel preparations for crushed nerves, injections of skeletal muscle cells for urinary continence or new salivary gland tissue to rescue radiation patients from dry mouth.

“The reason this technology works: It’s not really surgery,” Dr. Atala said. “We’re just priming the pump” by putting the appropriate cells into the appropriate place and asking the body to do the rest.