Vascular tissue engineering: promising approach in small diameter blood vessel regeneration

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of mortality around the world. The preferred treatment for the long-term revascularization of occluded vessels is surgery utilizing autologous or synthetic vascular grafts such as coronary artery bypass. However, these vessels are of limited availability, patients might not have a suitable vein, require invasive harvest, causes site morbidity, re-occurrence of thrombus formation, and are often unsuitable for use. Therefore, tissue engineering vascular grafts (TEVGs) have emerged as a new choice for substitution of damaged blood vessels and hold great promise for the advancement of cardiovascular surgery as well as other medical fields. TEVGs have the ability to grow and remodel and could therefore, make great advances in pediatric cardiovascular surgery. The recent development of completely TEVGs conduits that can be implanted for clinical application. This review summarized the current state of the art TEVGs, the major requirements of TEVGs, techniques for manufacturing a TEVG, materials used in TEVG production, and issues are facing all researchers in this field such as selecting the most suitable cell types to use in TEVG products, determining how to obtain and maintain the required graft mechanical properties, understanding the process of TEVG remodeling and integration with the host vasculature, and utilizing the most appropriate animal models for evaluations of potential grafts.

کلیدواژه ها:

Cardiovascular diseases ، Tissue engineering ، Natural graft ، Synthetic graft ، Small diameter vessel