Tissue-Engineered Human Vascular Media Produced in Vitro by the Self-Assembly Approach Present Functional Properties Similar to Those of Their Native Blood Vessels

See the full text in http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ten.2006.12.2275


The main object for their research is to develop vascular models which can be use for experimental studies in vitro. They are focusing on reconstruct the tissue-engineered vascular media, which is a very good in vitro model for the study of the functionality of human blood vessels.

The way to do this is first obtaining the endothelial cells from human umbilical vein. They test the responds of the human umbilical veins to endothelial cells(ET), and they figure out that by the activation of the ET receptors, the veins are able to responses to the ET. They then use the vascular smooth muscle cell to reconstruct the tissue-engineered vascular media. They first isolated the smooth muscle cell from the umbilical cord veins, and then culture the cell from human umbilical cord veins which has the expression on both the ET receptors. Then the smooth muscle cells are used to reconstruct the cultured media. By using the RT-PCR, they find out that there is mRNA of the both the ET receptors inside the Media they just reconstructed. By comparing the result with other publishes, the media shows the similar response to ET as the blood vessel from the smooth muscle cells.

Human blood vessels have very complex structures and they are not easy to take care. Therefore, doing experiments on human blood vessels to study the blood vessel functionality are like impossible work. For this reason, people want to use models rather than using the real blood vessels to the relative research. I like this article, because it gives idea on the development of blood vessels model. They can reconstruct the vascular media by using the tissue-engineered methods: isolates the vascular smooth muscle cells from human umbilical cord veins. They also test the response of the vascular media to blood vascular cells, and confirm that the media have similar kinds of response as the regular blood vessel.