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Man-made blood vessels could soon be available ‘off-the-shelf’
by Yasser Ali - February 21, 2011 - comments
The company has managed to make a universal blood vessel that would suit anyone and everyone
Do you need a new blood vessel? Well, just pick that one off the shelf. This might sound bizarre, but scientists have now been able to engineer artificial blood vessels which can be available ‘off-the-shelf’. You may no longer need to sacrifice blood vessels from any other part of your body.
The quest for artificial blood vessels has been on for a long time, nearly thirty years. Blood vessels are critical for heart bypass surgery and kidney dialysis patients.
Scientists at Humacyte Inc. in Durham have finally found a way to create viable blood vessels. They use real cells to build the vessel, and then discard the living cells so that the nonliving tissue can be stored and be available for everyone. They have published their findings in the Feb 2 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine.
This is the first time that scientists have been able to build usable blood vessels that can suit anyone, especially at the time of surgery.
This is the first time that scientists have been able to build usable blood vessels that can suit anyone, especially at the time of surgery. According to an estimate, nearly 10,000 Americans who go through bypass surgery every year are not able to get replacement blood vessels that are suitable for them. The procedure to make blood vessels using a patient’s own cells is extremely time-consuming and takes months.
A universal man-made blood vessel
Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, a biomedical engineer at Columbia University in New York, said that the company has managed to make a universal blood vessel that would suit anyone and everyone. "This is very practical and convenient for clinical applications," he added.
Humacyte Inc. has said that it now plans to begin human clinical trials but is unsure as to when these man-made blood vessels would be made available to the public.
Blood vessels critical during surgery
Replacement blood vessels are needed when surgeons do bypass heart surgery. These replacement blood vessels should be similar in size to the old ones. Although surgeons usually get these replacement blood vessels from other parts of the patient’s body, things get complicated if the patient has varicose veins, needs more than one bypass, or extra blood vessels that the surgeons are not able to extract without endangering the life of the patient.
Replacement blood vessels are usually had from the chest or from the legs. Most of these transplants using the patient’s own vessels are quite successful, according to Dr. Alan Kypson, a heart surgeon at the East Carolina Heart Institute in Greenville, N.C., who co-authored the Humacyte report.