Engineering Human Blood Vessels

Marsha Rolle, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), has spent more than a decade developing a method for building engineered blood vessels. It involves growing rings of human smooth muscle cells, stacking the rings inside a bioreactor, and flowing growth media over them until the rings merge into tubes. These “three-dimensional tissue constructs,” which closely mimic the characteristics of real blood vessels, could be used replace damaged vessels or serve as more realistic models for testing drugs for vascular diseases. This same technology can be used to make other tubular organs, including bronchial tubes, arteries, ureters, and tracheas.