Every year about, about 185,000 people pass in the United States DissectionAbout half of them are caused by cutting the circulation of an organ to the injured blood vessels. Surgeons can transplant an intact vein from somewhere else in a patient's body to avoid transplantation, but not everyone has a suitable vein for the crop.
A new advance in tissue engineering Could help. In December, the Food and Drug Administration approved Bioinagard blood vessel To treat vascular trauma. Northern Carolina -based biotech company created by Humacete, it is designed to restore blood flow in patients with painful injuries, such as gunshots, car accidents, industrial accidents, or war.
“Some patients have been so badly injured that they do not have any veins available,” says Humete founder and CEO Laura Niklason. Even when a patient has a usable, a vein is often not a good replacement for the artery. “Your veins are very thin. They are weak small structures, and your arteries are very strong, ”she says.
Niklason was first interested in the idea of increasing additional blood vessels in the 1990s, when she was training to become a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. She recalls that a patient has to undergo a heart bypass, which involves using a healthy vessel to recreate blood flow around a blocked coronary artery. The surgeon opened the abdomen, in search of a suitable blood vessel to use the patient's two legs, hands, and finally, the stomach. “It was really barbaric,” Niklason says. He felt that there is a better way.
He began with some cells collected from the pig arteries with growing blood vessels in the laboratory. When he implanted them into the animal, he acted like a real thing.
After those early experiments, it was a long road for humans approved by FDA. Niklason and his team spent more than a decade to separate the blood vessel cells from human organ and tissue donors. He tested cells from over 700 donors and found that five of those donors were most efficient in growing and expanding in the laboratory. Niklason says Humete now has enough cells from these five donors to make between 500,000 and one million engineer blood vessels.
The company currently makes ships in 200 batches, using custom-designed degradable polymer scaffolds which are 42 centimeters long and 6 millimeters thick. Scaffolds are placed in individual bags and are seeded with millions of donor cells. The bags then go to a school-bus-shaped incubator for soaking in nutritious bath for two months. While the tissue increases, it secrets collagen and other proteins that provide structural support. Eventually, the polymer scaffolding dissolves and the cells are washed with a special solution. Whatever is left is “de-cellulized” flexible tissue in the shape of a blood vessel. Because it does not have living human cells, it will not cause rejection when transplanted into a patient.
“People are trying to come up with such a tubular content,” says Anton Sidavi at the American College of Surgeons President-Fun and George Washington University Medical Center. Included with humacyte.