Medical experts hope they have found a technique that will someday offer a new source of blood vessels for diabetics with poor circulation and patients needing dialysis. Scientists from Cytograft Tissue Engineering Inc., a San Francisco Bay-area biotechnology company, reported Tuesday that two kidney dialysis patients from Argentina have received the world’s first blood vessels grown in a lab from snippets of their own skin."We think this is extraordinarily promising. 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.Two types of tissue are grown: one that forms the tough structure or backbone of the vessel and another that lines it and helps it to function.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.
