For the first time researchers have been able to create human blood vessels in the lab and inject them into patients. It might sound like something from a Sci-Fi movie, but researchers believe this new development could help those on kidney dialysis.
According to a study presented by the American Heart Association this breakthrough has two successful claims:
*For the first time, blood vessels created in the lab from donor skin cells were successfully implanted in patients.
*Functioning blood vessels that aren’t rejected by the immune system could be used to make durable shunts for kidney dialysis, and potentially to improve heart defects and adults needing coronary or other bypass graft surgery.
“Our approach could allow hundreds of thousands of patients to be treated from one master cell line,” said study lead author Todd N. McAllister, Ph.D., co-founder and chief executive officer of Cytograft Tissue Engineering Inc., of Novato, Calif.
Right now kidney dialysis is a long, expensive process. Each patient needs specialized cells created for dialysis, but these new vessels could make the process more of a ‘one cell fits all’ situation which could cut immensely cut down on cost.
The blood vessels were made by donated skin cells and were not rejected by any of patients. McAllister explains how the vessels were made, “The tissue-engineered blood vessels, produced from sheets of cultured skin cells rolled around temporary support structures, were used to create access shunts between arteries and veins in the arm for kidney dialysis in three patients. These shunts, which connect an artery to a vein, provide access to the blood for dialysis. The engineered vessels were about a foot long with a diameter of 4.8 millimeters.”
McAllister and other researchers believe this could have other long term benefits as well, including repair of congenital heart defects in pediatric patients and to fix damaged arteries in soldiers.
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