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

全世界每年有数百万例冠状动脉或外周动脉旁路移植术由心脏和血管外科医生使用患者自己的腿部静脉（SVG）或合成移植物进行。然而，>50%的这些移植物在5-10年后被阻塞，在收获部位常见感染，并且经常再次入院。由于可用动脉不足，仅在1：5的病例中使用患者自己的动脉，尽管其中>95%的动脉在15年后不会阻塞。使用实验室制造的动脉移植物为未来的患者提供了希望。我们之前的研究表明，将由猪或牛材料制成的生物管植入猪移植实验模型中会产生令人鼓舞但次优的结果。这是一个令人兴奋的进展，但我们需要改善移植物的衬里，以减少堵塞的发生。我们的目标是通过在生物支架上涂上能够吸引细胞的蛋白质来改善移植物，并创造一个合适的衬里来阻止血液凝块和细胞生长的阻塞。我们的计划将使我们能够获得更类似于真实的动脉的移植物，从而避免使用患者自己的腿部静脉，并诱导患者的血细胞产生最佳的移植物。这将为在5-10年内将这项新技术带到床边铺平道路，同时为卫生服务节省大量资源，并大大改善患者的福祉和结果。

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.