Imagine being able to replace failing heart blood vessels without surgery! That is the ultimate goal of a research team at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston who have, for the first time, grown functioning blood vessels in laboratory mice using cells taken from human bone marrow, blood and umbilical cords. Juan M. Melero-Martin, a research fellow at Harvard and co-author of the study, said they envision a day when "a patient has need to vascularize ischemic tissue, we can get cells from the patient ahead of time, grow them and inject them back into the patient."The cells were mixed with nutrients and growth factors in a culture dish and then implanted into the cells of mice with weakened immune systems. After one week, the cells grew into a network of vessels that connected to each other and the blood vessels of the mice, without genetic alteration or manipulation to improve their growth. They continued to transport blood during the four-week study. "It's kind of a self-assembly process; they do the job on their own," Dr. Bischoff said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg. "We mix them together and they talk to each other and give directions on how to form a blood vessel."
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