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Health See other Health Articles Title: Surgeons Implant Bioengineered Blood Vein Shunt TEHRAN (FNA)- A team of doctors helped create a bioengineered blood vessel and implanted it into the arm of a patient with end-stage kidney disease. The procedure, the first-of-its-kind operation in the United States to test the safety and effectiveness of the bioengineered 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 properties that would cause organ rejection. Using the technology developed at Duke University Hospital, 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. "This is a pioneering event in medicine," said Jeffrey H. Lawson, a vascular surgeon and vascular biologist at Duke Medicine who helped develop the technology and performed the implantation. "It's exciting to see something you've worked on for so long become a reality. We talk about translational technology -- developing ideas from the laboratory to clinical practice -- and this only happens where there is the multi-disciplinary support and collaboration to cultivate it," he added. Clinical trials to test the new veins began in Poland in December with the first human implantations. The US Food and Drug Administration recently approved a phase 1 trial involving 20 kidney dialysis patients in the United States, followed by a safety review. Duke researchers enrolled the first US patient and serve as study leaders. The initial trial focuses on implanting the vessels in an easily accessible site in the arms of kidney hemodialysis patients. More than 320,000 people in the United States require hemodialysis, which often necessitates a graft to connect an artery to a vein to speed blood flow during treatments. Current options have drawbacks. Synthetic vascular grafts are prone to clotting, leading to frequent hospitalizations, and harvesting veins from the patient's own body involves a separate procedure, with the risk of infection and other complications. If the bioengineered veins prove beneficial for hemodialysis patients, the researchers ultimately aim to develop a readily available and durable graft for heart bypass surgeries, which are performed on nearly 400,000 people in the US a year, and to treat blocked blood vessels in the limbs. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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