Interstitial cystitis is a chronic inflammatory disease of the urinary bladder, the pathogenesis of which is unknown. Differentiation between IC and other causes of chronic pelvic pain is difficult, and the diagnosis of IC is one of exclusion. The investigator has developed a series of measurements (e.g., colony size, proliferative rate) on urothelial cells that appear to change in patients with IC. The goal of this phase 1 STTR application is to evaluate the ability of these assays to predict the diagnosis of interstitial cystitis and to develop them into a useful diagnostic test.
