Every year, about 185,000 people in the United States have been cut off. Almost half of them are because the injured blood vessels cut the circulation to the limbs. Surgeon can transplant an intact vein from somewhere in the patient’s body to avoid cutting, but not everyone has a suitable vein to harvest.
New progress of organizational engineering may be useful. In December, the Food and Pharmaceutical Bureau approved bi -engineering blood vessels to treat blood vessels. It is designed by Humashite, a biotechnology company based on North Carolina, and has been designed to restore the blood flow of traumatic injured patients, such as gun voices, car accidents, industrial accidents, and battles.
“Some patients are so severely injured that they can’t use venous,” says Laura Niklason, the founder and CEO of Humacyte. Even if the patient has something that can be used, the vein is often not a good alternative. “Your vein is very thin. These are weak structures and your arteries are very strong,” she says.
Nikrazon was first interested in the idea of ​​cultivating spare blood vessels when he was trained to become a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1990s. She remembers that she has observed a patient receiving heart bypass. This reverses the blood flow around the blocked coronary artery using a healthy container. The surgeon opened both the patient’s feet, arms, and finally the stomach and searched for appropriate blood vessels. “It was just a field bar,” says Nikrason. She thought she had to have a better way.
She started by cultivating blood vessels in the lab from several cells collected from pig arteries. When she transplant them into animals, they worked like real.
After these early experiments, it was a long way to human FDA approval products. Nikrason and her team spent more than 10 years from human organs and tissue donors. They tested cells from more than 700 donors and found that cells from five of those donors were most efficient in the lab growth and expansion. According to Nikrason, Humacyte is banking sufficient cells from these five donors to create 500,000 to 1 million engineering blood vessels.
The company is currently producing ships in 200 batches using a 42 cm long and 6 mm -mm -thick custom design decomposed polymer scaffold. The scaffold is put in individual bags and millions of donor cells are seeded. After that, the bag enters the school size incubator and soaks it in a nutrition bath for two months. The organization grows, but secretes collagen and other proteins that provide structural support. Eventually, the polymer scaffold is dissolved and the cells are washed away by a special solution. What remains is a flexible tissue in the shape of a blood vessel. It does not cause a living human cells and does not cause rejection when embedded in a patient.
“People have been thinking of such a tubular material for a long time,” said Anton Sidawi, the president of the U.S. Surgeon and a blood vessel surgeon at the George Washington Medical Center. I am involved in Humacyte.
(Tagstotranslate) Science (T) Biotech (T) Health (T) Surger (T) cells
