Scientists grow human blood vessels in breakthrough UBC research
Posted Jan 18, 2019 10:28 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — A new development coming out of UBC is being called a medical breakthrough.
Scientists at UBC have discovered how to grow blood vessels and organoids in petri dishes inside research labs for the first time. The discovery is considered a breakthrough in engineering technology that could be used for research to combat diseases like diabetes, cancer and other diseases.
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Dr. Josef Penninger says preventing any change to blood vessels is the key when it comes to preventing diseases.
“Blood vessels play a role in basically every aspect of our body and our biology, and we have been now able, for the first time, to engineer perfect human blood vessels,” he tells NEWS 1130. “We now actually are able to model human diseases.”
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He calls the research a ‘game-changer,’ as every organ in the body is linked to the circulatory system. This discovery could help researchers find the causes and treatments for various vascular diseases, like Alzheimer’s, heart disease, problems with wound-healing, and strokes.
While some scientists have been able to recreate human tissues, creating blood vessels is undiscovered territory.
“Blood vessels support all the tissue that transport oxygen and nutrients in our tissues, and this had not been possible before,” he says. “This was really one of the final barriers of human tissue engineering.”
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Growing the ‘organoids’ in the lab involves creating three-dimensional human blood vessels from stem cells that mimic organs.
“What is so exciting about our work is that we were successful in making real human blood vessels out of stem cells,” Reiner Wimmer, one of the authors of the study says in a press release. “Our organoids resemble human capillaries to a great extent, even on a molecular level, and we can now use them to study blood vessel diseases directly on human tissue.”
So far it hasn’t been used on humans, but animal testing using mice has started for diabetes research.
– With files from Taran Parmar
