U of M Researchers Beginning Clinical Pediatric Blood Vessel Trial

(KNSI) – Researchers at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities hope they are on the verge of a major breakthrough after three decades of studying how to create artificial blood vessels.

The goal is to manufacture arteries and veins to replace those damaged in children with congenital heart defects. Today’s substitutes must be changed out as the body matures. That means multiple surgeries because the equipment can’t adapt. Biomedical Engineering Professor Robert Tranquillo explains why current work could yield something different.

“We can take a donor skin cell and use those donor cells to grow something like a blood vessel. Then we remove the donor cells with a detergent process so that we can plant it into other people and it won’t induce an immune response.”

Tranquillo says this is the result of 30 years worth of effort, and hopefully leads to greater breakthroughs. Heart valves will be more difficult than blood vessels, though.

“There’s more that can go wrong with a heart valve. The leaflets need to constantly, that is like one time every second, bend open and closed and allow for the blood to flow in just one direction and not backward. So, that’s a harder threshold to get across.”

The tissue has been successfully installed in lambs already, both as a blood vessel and a heart valve. Tranquillo says there is a good reason why sheep are used for this kind of research.

“If the material is going to calcify, which is a major problem with most heart valve substitutes, it will be known in the sheep model fairly quickly because sheep have a very aggressive calcification pathway.”

The $3.7 million grant for the trial comes from the Department of Defense.

___