Blood vessels keep us alive. They are the highways that transport oxygen-rich blood and nutrients to all corners of our body – feeding our tissue and organs – while simultaneously removing toxic waste products.
Blood vessel disease and dysfunction can result in life-threatening situations like heart attack, stroke and aneurysm. Blood vessel failures are a major reason why cardiovascular disease is the number one killer globally.
Bypass surgery is often used to replace severely diseased blood vessels. Non-living grafts made of synthetic polymers can be used in many cases.
However, small diameter blood vessels – like the coronary artery that feeds blood to the heart – cannot be replaced with synthetic vessels because blood will clot on their surface and obstruct the graft.
In these cases, a less essential blood vessel is taken from elsewhere in the body and used to re-route blood around the diseased vessel, restoring blood flow to the starving tissue.
If successful, bypass surgery can add many more healthy years to a patient’s life.
Bypass surgery is a lifesaving treatment, but there are significant limitations. Most pressingly, some patients lack appropriate donor vessels due to previous surgeries or comorbidities like diabetes which means treatment options for these patients are limited.
But what if we could instead manufacture ‘real’ blood vessels to treat these patients?
ARE ‘TISSUE ENGINEERED’ BLOOD VESSELS THE ANSWER?
Tissue engineered blood vessels – blood vessels that are fabricated using human cells and tissue – could provide a viable treatment option.
Additionally, we could use these vessels for many other purposes – like creating a built-in blood supply when engineering larger tissue constructs. This isn’t currently possible because the tissue would die when implanted into the body.
Despite the need for tissue engineered blood vessels, successfully creating them has proved challenging. Blood vessels are complex, multilayered tissues and their structure is intimately tied to their performance.
