Originally published December 3 2005
Biotech firm begins testing technique of creating blood vessels from skin samples
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A San Francisco Bay-area biotechnology company called Cytograft Tissue Engineering has pioneered a technique that can grow bloods vessels for patients from cultures of their own skin cells.
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 doesn't involve stem cells and therefore is not politically or ethically contentious.
It 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 that help it produce substances such as collagen and elastin, which give tissues their shape and texture.
Sheets of this tissue are produced, and are then stacked and rolled into vessels 6 to 8 inches long, said Todd McAllister, a scientist and 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 Nicholas L'Heureux, the company's chief scientific officer who invented the method.
Still, that means that only patients whose needs are known that far ahead of time could be considered.
The focus now is on diabetics who need dialysis, machines to filter wastes from their blood because their failing kidneys no longer can.
They number 285,000 in the United States and double that worldwide.
To enable dialysis, doctors 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.
"The problem is, as you puncture that over and over and over, the vessel tends to fail," McAllister said.
Patients often run out of healthy vessels that can be cut out and moved to form a shunt, and synthetic vessels often don't last long and can develop complications.
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