Patients Get Blood Vessels Grown in Lab From Own skinBlood Vessels Grown in Lab

DALLAS (AP) — Medical experts hope they have found a technique that will someday offer a new source of blood vessels for diabetics with poor circulation and patients needing dialysis.

Scientists from Cytograft Tissue Engineering Inc., a San Francisco Bay-area biotechnology company, reported Tuesday that two kidney dialysis patients from Argentina have received the world’s first blood vessels grown in a lab from snippets of their own skin.

“We think that there are a number of patients who would benefit from tissue-engineered vessels,” said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which has poured $2.5 million into the tiny company’s work.

The method involves taking a piece of skin and a vein, less than a quarter-inch square, from the back of the hand. This tissue snippet is placed in a lab dish and nurtured with growth enhancers.

Sheets of tissue are produced, then are stacked and rolled into vessels 6 to 8 inches long, said Todd McAllister, a co-founder of the company.

This takes six to nine months, but faster development should be possible once ways are found to do the work on a commercial scale, said a company official.

To enable kidney dialysis for diabetics, doctors now create a shunt, a kind of short-circuit that connects an artery and vein, which is tapped into three times a week for the procedure.

Patients often run out of healthy vessels that can be cut out and moved to form a shunt. Synthetic vessels often don’t last long and can develop complications. The “home-grown” vessels might last longer, researchers say.

Blood vessels grown in lab A California biotch firm has implanted bio-engineered tisue in two patients. The new procedure holds promise for thousand of dialysis and heart bypass patients.

A qaurter-inch square of skin with a vein was taken from a patient’s hand. It was grown in a dish to produce proteins such as collagen found in cartilage and bone. The cultured protein was then molded into three-dimensinal blood vessels. The molded tissue replaced shunts in tow kiney dialysis patients.

Source: Cytograft Tissue Engineering, Inc.