This blood vessel was grown in a laboratory with real human cells

Every year, around 185,000 people in the United States undergo amputation. Almost half of them are caused by wounded blood vessels cutting off the circulation to the limb. Surgeons can transplant the intact vein from the patient’s body to avoid amputation, but not everyone has the right vein for harvesting.

You can assist modern progress in tissue engineering. In December, the Food and Drug Agency approved Bioengineering blood vessel in the treatment of vascular injury. The biotechnology company from North Carolina, made by Humcyte, is aimed at restoring blood flow in patients with trauma injuries, for example from shots, car accidents, industrial accidents or fighting.

“Some patients are so seriously injured that they have no available veins,” says Laura Niklason, founder and general director of Humcyte. Even when the patient is useful, the vein is often not a good substitute for the artery. “Your veins are very thin. They are weak small structures, and your arteries are very strong, “he says.

Niklason for the first time became interested in the idea of ​​growing spare blood vessels in the 90s, when the doctor in Massachusetts General Hospital was training. He remembers observing a patient undergoing a heart beltway, which consists in using a robust vessel to redirect blood flow around the blocked coronary artery. The surgeon opened both patient’s legs, shoulders, and finally the stomach in search of the right blood vessel for exploit. “It was simply barbaric,” says Niklason. She decided that she had to be a better way.

She began with the cultivation of blood vessels in the laboratory with only a few cells collected from pig arteries. When she transplanted them with an animal, they worked like a real thing.

After these early experiments, it was a long way to a product approved by the FDA for people. Niklason and her syndrome spent over a decade, insulating the cells of blood vessels from human organs and tissue donors. They tested cells from over 700 donors and found that people of five of these donors were most productive in cultivation and expansion in the laboratory. Niklason claims that Humacyte now has enough cells of these five donors to earn from 500,000 to a million designed blood vessels.

The company currently produces parties for 200 parties, using non -standard polymer scaffolds, which are 42 centimeters long and 6 millimeters hefty. The scaffoldings are placed in individual bags and vaccinated with millions of donor cells. The bags then enter the school size incubator to immerse themselves in a nutrition bath for two months. While the tissue grows, secretes collagen and other proteins that provide structural support. Ultimately, polymer scaffolding dissolves and the cells are washed with a special solution. The remaining “decollarized” elastic tissue in the shape of a blood vessel. Because it does not contain live human cells, it will not cause rejection after implantation of the patient.

“People have long been trying to come up with such a tubular material,” says Anton Sidawy, president-elect of American College of Surgeons and vascular surgeon at the George Washington University Medical Center, which is not involved with humcyte.