In a first-of-its-kind operation in the United States, a team of surgeons at Duke University Hospital helped create a bioengineered blood vessel and implanted it into the arm of a kidney dialysis patient.
The procedure, part of a U.S. clinical trial to test the safety and effectiveness of the blood vessel, is a milestone in the field of tissue engineering. The new vein is an off-the-shelf, human cell-based product with no biological link to the patient that would cause organ rejection.
Using technology developed at Duke and at a spin-off company it started called Humacyte, the vein is engineered by cultivating donated human cells on a tubular scaffold to form a vessel. The vessel is then cleansed of the qualities that might trigger an immune response. In pre-clinical tests, the veins have performed better than other synthetic and animal-based implants.
The project has been a 15-year collaboration between Duke's Jeffrey Lawson, MD, PhD, professor of surgery and pathology, and Laura Niklason, MD, PhD, co-founder of Humacyte and a former faculty member at Duke who is now at Yale.