Lab-Grown Blood Vessel Used for First Time in the U.S.

June 8, 2013 Leave a comment

Lab-Grown Blood Vessel Used for First Time in the U.S.

A 62-year-old Virginia man with kidney failure received the first genetically engineered blood vessel in the U.S., a vein that may improve his dialysis treatments and pave the way for future tissue transplants.

The operation at Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, yesterday marked the first time doctors have implanted an “off-the-shelf” tissue graft in the U.S. The vessel, grown with human cells on a mesh tube, has the potential to be widely used since it was cleansed of any lingering cells that may trigger an immune reaction, said the doctors who performed the surgery.The vessel was implanted into the man’s arm, giving doctors easier access when performing dialysis. Many patients need grafts to connect an artery to a vein to speed blood flow during the procedure. Synthetic devices and veins harvested from other parts of a patient’s body carry side effects that can limit their usefulness. If the procedure is successful, man-made human veins may be used in heart-bypass surgery.

“A blood vessel is really an organ — it’s complex tissue,” Jeffrey Lawson, a vascular surgeon at Duke Medicine who helped develop the approach and performed the implant, said in a statement. “We start with this, and one day we may be able to engineer a liver or a kidney or an eye.”

The implant was part of an early clinical trial approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that will include 20 patients. More than 350,000 Americans undergo dialysis in the U.S. each year. Doctors in Poland first used genetically engineered blood vessels in patients in 2011.

The Duke researchers worked with officials at Humacyte Inc., a closely held company based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, that was spun off from the university to develop the technology. Cytograft Tissue Engineering Inc., a closely held company based in Novato, California, is working on a similar approach.

To contact the reporter on this story: Michelle Fay Cortez in Minneapolis at mcortez@bloomberg.net

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