Potential of acellular biological scaffold coated with chemokines and cytokines as tissue engineered small artery grafts

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Millions of coronary or peripheral artery bypass grafts are performed yearly worldwide by cardiac and vascular surgeons using patient's own veins from the leg (SVG) or synthetic grafts. However, >50% of these grafts get blocked after 5-10 years, with common infections at the harvesting sites and frequent hospital re-admissions. Patient's own arteries are used only in 1:5 cases due to shortage of available artery, despite >95% of these do not get blocked after 15 years. Using arterial grafts made in the lab provides hope for future patients. Our previous research suggests that implanting biological tubes made from pig or cow material into a pig graft experimental model leads to encouraging but sub-optimal results. This is an exciting development, but we need to improve the lining of the graft to reduce the occurrence of blockages. Our goal is to improve the grafts by coating the biological scaffolds with proteins able to attract cells and create a suitable lining which stops blockage by blood clots and cell growth. Our plan will allow us to achieve grafts more similar to real arteries which avoid the use of the patients own leg vein and induce the patients blood cells to create an optimal graft. This would pave the road to bringing this new technology to the bedside in 5-10 years, while saving large amount of resources to the health services and greatly improving patient's well-being and outcome.