“Conditioned” Tissue-Engineered Blood Vessels Hold Promise

Vascular grafts are a hot topic in the land of medical devices. When the best synthetic option is Teflon there’s some engineering to do.
The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology is running a story on a recently published paper describing a novel vascular graft that hybridizes a polymer and human cells. While this isn’t an entirely new idea, Dr. Rashid et al. utilize “conditioning” to prepare the graft for the high shear forces created by high-velocity blood.
The team exposed a poly-urethane vessel seeded with endothelial and smooth muscle cells derived from umbilical cord blood to slowly increasing pulsatile fluid flow for 2-8 hours. In a way, they are training the vessel for the real thing.
The “trained” vessel had better cell retention and organization than their untrained counterparts. Unfortunately there wasn’t any data on how the trained vessel performed mechanically.
Check out the publication: Tissue engineering of a hybrid bypass graft for coronary and lower limb bypass surgery (The FASEB Journal. 2008;22:2084-2089.)
Flashbacks: Tissue-engineered blood vessels, Nano-fiber based vascular grafts
Image credit: Wellcome images: Coronary artery bypass graft…