Engineering Blood Vessels

Blood vessels that can be developed in a laboratory can be used to replace diseased or damaged vessels. Imagine their use in bypass surgery: instead of harvesting a vessel from a patient’s body, the vessel can be grown in a laboratory from the patient’s own cells. Alternatively, laboratory-grown vessels can be used with dialysis patients. In most dialysis treatment cases, a fistula is created by surgically connecting an artery and vein in a patient’s arm. However, creating a fistula is difficult in patients with diseased vessels. While synthetic vessels are an option, they are prone to infection and need to be replaced often. But a laboratory-grown vessel would resolve that problem.

How It Works

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The engineered vessels we are creating are constructed using a tubular scaffold, the building block of the new vessel. A patient’s own cells can be grown on the scaffold. The process starts with collecting a type of stem cell from a sample of a patient’s blood. From these stem cells, endothelial cells are grown in the laboratory (the cells that line blood vessels and prevent clots). Once there are enough cells, the cells are placed on the scaffold and then engineered vessel is placed in a bioreactor system to acclimate it to the conditions of the human body.

See this process in a video presentation. 

Next Project

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Scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine are actively seeking ways to make replacing amputated limbs a reality by engineering component parts.

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