Each year, about 185,000 people in the United States amputated. Nearly half of them are due to the injured blood vessels cut into a limb. The surgeon may implant an intact vein from another place in the patient's body to avoid amputation, but not everyone has a suitable vein for harvesting.
A new progress in Tissue Can help. In December, the approved food and pharmaceutical management agency Biological ship To treat vascular injury. Produced by a Biotechnology Company based in North Carolina, it is designed to restore blood flow in injured patients, such as gunshot, car accident, industrial accident or fight.
Some patients were so seriously injured that they did not have any veins, Laura Niklason, the founder and CEO of Humacyte. Even if a patient has a patient who can use, a vein is usually not a good replacement for a artery. Your veins are very thin. They are small structures and your arteries are very strong, she said.
Niklason started to pay attention to the idea of planting backup blood vessels in the 1990s, when she was trained to become a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. She recalled the observation of a patient through a heart bypass, involved in the use of a healthy vessel to rely on the blood flow around a blocked coronary artery. The surgeon has opened both the patient's legs and arms, and finally, the stomach, to search for a suitable blood vessel to use. This is just a barbaric. She thought that there must be a better way.
She began with the development of blood vessels in the laboratory from only a few cells collected from pig arteries. When she transplanted them into animals, they worked lifelike.
After the initial experiments, it was a long way to a product that was approved by the FDA. Niklason and her group spent more than a decade of isolation from vascular cells from organs and human sponsors. They tested cells from more than 700 sponsors and found that people from the sponsors were the most effective people in developing and expanding in the laboratory. Niklason said Humacyte currently has enough cells from the five sponsors to earn from 500,000 to one million blood vessels designed.
The company currently produces ships in phase 200, using decomposition polymer scaffolding designed, 42 cm long and 6 mm thick. Scaffolding is placed in individual pockets and sown by millions of sponsors' cells. The bags then go into a school bus size to soak in a nutritious bath for two months. While the tissues grow, it secrete collagen and other proteins that provide structural support. Finally, soluble polymer scaffolding and cells are swept away by a special solution. What is left is that flexible tissues without the main cell in the shape of a blood vessel. Because it does not contain living cells, it will not cause refusal when implanted into the patient.
People have tried to offer a tubular material like this for a long time. Related to Humacyte.