Every year, within 185,000 people in the United States are subjected to amputation. Approximately half of these cases due to damaged blood vessels that cut blood circulation to the organs. Surgeons can connect an intact vein to the patient’s body to prevent amputation, but not everyone has a suitable vein to harvest.
New progress in tissue engineering can help. In December, the Food and Drug Administration approved a biological blood vessel for the treatment of vascular trauma. Built by North Carolina -based biotechnology, Humacyte, it is designed to restore blood flow to patients with injuries, such as bullet firing, car accidents, industrial accidents or war.
“Some patients are seriously injured who have no veins available,” says Laura Nicholason, founder and CEO of Humacete. Even when a patient is usable, a vein is often not a good replacement for the artery. Your veins are very thin. They are small structures weak and your arteries are very strong. “
Nicholason first became interested in the idea of growing spare blood vessels in the 1990s when he was training a doctor at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He recalls that a patient under a bypass of a heart is observed, which includes the use of a healthy ship to redirect blood around a coronary artery. In search of the suitable blood vessel for use, the surgeon opened both the patient’s legs, arm and eventually. “It was really brutal,” Nicholason says. He realized that there should be a better way.
He only started from a few cells collected from pig arteries with the growth of blood vessels in the laboratory. When he linked them to the animal, they worked like reality.
Subsequently, the early tests were this long road to a product approved by the FDA for humans. Nicholason and his team spent more than a decade separating blood vessel cells from human organs and tissue donors. They tested cells from more than 700 donors and found that out of five of these donors were the most efficient in growth and expansion in the laboratory. Nicholason says Homumite now has enough cells of these five donors to produce between 500,000 and one million engineering blood vessels.
The company is currently using custom destructive polymer scaffolding that is 42 cm long and 6 mm thick. The scaffolds are placed in separate bags and planted with millions of donor cells. The bags then go to an incubator about the size of a school to soak in a nutritious bath for two months. As the tissue grows, it secretes collagen and other proteins that provide structural support. Finally, the polymer scaffold is dissolved and the cells are washed with a specific solution. What remains is the “cellular” flexible tissue in the form of a blood vessel. Since it does not contain living human cells, it does not reject when planting in the patient.
“People are trying to face a pipe -like material for a long time,” said Anton Sidavi, the president of the American School of Surgeons and a vascular surgeon at the George Washington University Medical Center. Involved with Humacyte.
