Staining on these slides shows that engineered human arteries produce contractile proteins (left) and calponin (right) just one week after being grown in culture. These two molecules allow the arteries to contract and dilate in response to environmental stimuli.
Just like pretty much everything else in our bodies, the blood vessels are more complicated than their physical characteristics. There’s a great deal of biochemical nuance that goes on within blood vessel walls between the endothelium, the inner cellular layer, and the tunica media, the next layer that’s composed of smooth muscle cells. In order to build artificial blood vessels for such things as drug research and eventually organ production, mimicking how blood vessels work at the biochemical level is key.
Researchers at Duke University have now created rudimentary artificial vessels that contain both an endothelium and the tunica media, and have shown that the two layers interact much like they do within our own bodies.
The tiny vessels are actually an order of magnitude smaller than the ones they were modeled on, but because of their size they can be produced much faster than has been done at other labs in the past. This has allowed the researchers to rapidly test whether the artificial vessels behave like real ones when put under various stimuli and whether the biochemistry within the vessel walls looked healthy.
The researchers hope that soon their vessels will be used to perform high volume drug testing prior to trialing compounds on humans, leading to safer drugs, quicker clinical trials, and more drugs moving through the development pipeline.
via medgadget
Researchers at Duke University have now created rudimentary artificial vessels that contain both an endothelium and the tunica media, and have shown that the two layers interact much like they do within our own bodies.
The tiny vessels are actually an order of magnitude smaller than the ones they were modeled on, but because of their size they can be produced much faster than has been done at other labs in the past. This has allowed the researchers to rapidly test whether the artificial vessels behave like real ones when put under various stimuli and whether the biochemistry within the vessel walls looked healthy.
The researchers hope that soon their vessels will be used to perform high volume drug testing prior to trialing compounds on humans, leading to safer drugs, quicker clinical trials, and more drugs moving through the development pipeline.
via medgadget
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