Organ failure is one of the most frequent and devastating problems in human health care, costing in excess of $400 billion annually.  Failure of the vascular tissue remains one of the primary causes of death in this country.  Surgical replacement using donor tissue is often successful, but high quality graft tissue is in very short supply.  Tissue replacement therapy, using grafts constructed in vitro from living human cells and man-made or natural biopolymers is becoming a viable and desirable alternative.  Incorporating human cells into a three dimensional meshwork, fashioned from natural material, e.g, collagen, or synthetic polymers can generate structurally and functionally appropriate grafting material.  A detailed understanding of the tissue to be modeled is essential for this task to be accomplished.

          Recently, advances in several branches of science and technology have made it possible to “construct” living in vitro models of human tissue.  During the past several years we have been successful in constructing models of the human skin and the cornea.

          We propose to construct a Human Vascular Tissue Equivalent composed of a matrix containing collagen type I, populated densely with human umbilical artery smooth muscle cells (HUASMC).  This matrix will be lined with human artery endothelial cells (HAECs) on one side and a collagen type I gel containing sparse population of human dermal fibroblasts (HDFbs) on the other side.  The result of this will be the ability to manufacture human arteries.  In some cases this could be using the patient’s own cells.  The commercial application for this technology would include every one of the millions of bypass surgeries done every year, plus many other uses in vessel replacement therapy.

© Cardiovascular Research Institute, February 2000
An Institute of Discovery at the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth