Latest Capillary Stories

[Watch the Video: Engineering Blood Vessels ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Researchers from the University of Michigan (UM) have reportedly discovered a way to overcome one of the primary obstacles to growing replacement hearts, lungs, kidneys and other new organs. Those replacement organs often fail because of the difficulties associated with building blood vessels in order to keep their tissues alive. Now UM associate biomedical engineering professor...

Washington University in St. Louis [ Watch The Video Red Blood Cells Bifuracating in Capillary ] In an engineering breakthrough, a Washington University in St. Louis biomedical researcher has discovered a way to use light and color to measure oxygen in individual red blood cells in real time. The technology, developed by Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, could eventually be used to determine how oxygen is delivered to normal and...

Measuring relative changes in the number of capillaries under the skin more accurately predicts expectant mom's likelihood of developing preeclampsia Pregnant women who have a reduced number of capillaries under their skin during pregnancy may be at heightened risk for preeclampsia, according to research being presented at the American College of Cardiology's 62nd Annual Scientific Session. Researchers say monitoring such changes in small blood vessels early in pregnancy may allow for...

Rice University [ Watch The Video ] By thinking of cells as programmable robots, researchers at Rice University hope to someday direct how they grow into the tiny blood vessels that feed the brain and help people regain functions lost to stroke and disease. Rice bioengineer Amina Qutub and her colleagues simulate patterns of microvasculature cell growth and compare the results with real networks grown in their lab. Eventually, they want to develop the ability to control the way...

Researchers are hopeful that new advances in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine could one day make a replacement liver from a patient's own cells, or animal muscle tissue that could be cut into steaks without ever being inside a cow. Bioengineers can already make 2D structures out of many kinds of tissue, but one of the major roadblocks to making the jump to 3D is keeping the cells within large structures from suffocating; organs have complicated 3D blood vessel networks that are...

Discovery could highlight a new avenue for drug development to combat neurodegenerative disorder University of British Columbia scientists may have uncovered a new explanation for how Alzheimer's disease destroys the brain – a profusion of blood vessels. While the death of cells, whether they are in the walls of blood vessels or in brain tissue, has been a major focus of Alzheimer's disease research, a team led by Wilfred Jefferies, a professor in UBC's Michael Smith Laboratories, has...

Rice, BCM discovery addresses key roadblock to growing replacement tissues, organsResearchers from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) have broken one of the major roadblocks on the path to growing transplantable tissue in the lab: They've found a way to grow the blood vessels and capillaries needed to keep tissues alive.The new research is available online and due to appear in the January issue of the journal Acta Biomaterialia."The inability to grow blood-vessel...

Although the incidence of malaria has declined in all but a few countries worldwide, according to a World Health Organization report earlier this month, malaria remains a global threat. Nearly 800,000 people succumbed to the mosquito-borne disease in 2009, nearly all of them in the developing world.Physicians do not have reliable treatment for the virus at various stages, largely because no one has been able to document the malaria parasite's journeys in the body.Now researchers at Brown...

Physicians caring for patients with sepsis may soon have a new safe and cost-effective treatment for this life-threatening illness. Research led by Dr. Karel Tyml and his colleagues at The University of Western Ontario and Lawson Health Research Institute have found that vitamin C can not only prevent the onset of sepsis, but can reverse the disease.Sepsis is caused by a bacterial infection that can begin anywhere in your body. Your immune system goes into overdrive, overwhelming normal...

While the blood-brain barrier (BBB) protects the brain from harmful chemicals occurring naturally in the blood, it also obstructs the transport of drugs to the brain. In an article in Nature scientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet now present a potential solution to the problem. The key to the BBB is a cell-type in the blood vessel walls called pericytes, and the researchers hope that their findings will one day contribute to new therapies for diseases like...