Two kidney dialysis patients from Argentina have received the world's first blood vessels grown in a lab dish from snippets of their own skin, a promising step toward helping people with a variety of diseases...Technorati Tags: Dialysis, Cytograft, Tissue Engineering
People with certain chronic conditions, such as dialysis patients, often run out of healthy vessels.
Growing them involves taking a piece of skin and a vein, less than a quarter-inch square, from the back of the hand. It's placed in a lab dish and nurtured with growth enhancers that help it produce substances like collagen and elastin, which give tissues their shape and texture...
Sheets of this tissue are produced — "You can cover your desk with a sheet," said Todd McAllister, a scientist and co-founder of the company — and then stacked and rolled into vessels 6 to 8 inches long...
Patients often run out of healthy vessels that can be cut out and moved to form a shunt, and synthetic vessels often don't last long and can develop complications...
The woman's new vessel has withstood needle punctures three times a week for six months and the man's, for almost three.
I'm Dr. Joshua Schwimmer, a nephrologist and internal medicine physician in New York City. • Kidney Notes was the first active nephrology blog. (Trivia: Kidney Notes is so old that the National Library of Medicine still uses it as an example of how to formally cite blogs.) • Professionally, you can find me at Kidney.nyc. • Kidney Notes is for educational purposes only, not medical advice. Consult qualified health care professionals. See disclaimer.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
First Blood Vessels Grown From Patient's Skin for Hemodialysis Fistula
Via USA Today: