Weaving Blood Vessels


Photo: Cytograft

You're looking at a "rope" made from braided human parts. No, it's not a premise for a new Syfy movie, rather a new tissue engineering technique by biotech firm Cytograft:

... the biological strands could be used to weave blood vessel patches and grafts that a patient's body would readily accept for wound repair. The process is faster and could be more cost-effective than other methods of producing biological tissue replacements. [...]

Cytograft's technique draws upon a long history of medical textiles, which are typically produced with synthetic fibers like polyester. "Creating textiles is an ancient and powerful technique, and combining it with biomaterials is exciting because it has so much more versatility than the sheet method," says Christopher Breuer, a surgeon, scientist, and tissue engineer at the Yale School of Medicine. "The notion of making blood vessels or more complex shapes like heart valves, or patches for the heart, is much easier to do with fibers," he says. "If you can make fibers of any length, then there is no limit to the size or shape that you can make."

And that's a better than any science fiction tale you can weave: Link - via Kurzweil


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