Human blood vessels grown in a laboratory from donor skin cells were successfully implanted into patients for the first time.
Functioning blood vessels that aren’t rejected by the immune system could be used to make durable shunts to allow movement of fluid from one part of the body to another, opening doors for better and cheaper kidney dialysis and potentially for improved treatment for children with heart defects and adults needing coronary or other bypass graft surgery.
The vessels were produced from sheets of cultured skin cells rolled around temporary support structures and used to create shunts between arteries and veins in the arm for kidney dialysis in three patients. The engineered vessels were about a foot long and 4.8 millimeters in diameter.
Eight months after implantation none of the three patients had developed an immune reaction to the implants and the vessels withstood high pressure and frequent needle punctures required for dialysis.
The grafts could also be used in lower limb bypass to route blood around diseased arteries, to repair congenital heart defects in children and to fixed damaged arteries in soldiers who might otherwise lose a limb, according to lead researcher, co-founder and CEO of Cytograft Tissue Engineering Inc.
"Besides addressing a costly and vexing problem in kidney dialysis, off-the-shelf blood vessels might someday be used instead of harvesting patients’ own vessels for bypass surgery. A larger, randomized trial of the grafts is under way for kidney dialysis, and human trials have been initiated to assess the safety and effectiveness of these grafts for lower-limb bypass," according to an American Heart Assn. press release.
The research results were presented at the American Heart Assn.’s Emerging Science series webinar this week.