Bioengineered Body Parts

On June 6th, a group of doctors at Duke University successfully implanted the first bioengineered blood vessel into a live patient. Though bioengineering has been advancing rapidly, this procedure was the first successful implant of any synthetically bioengineered body part.

Implanted into a patient suffering from the end stages of kidney disease, the vein had been synthesized from donated human cells that were then developed on a scaffold. In order to prevent any antibodies in the patient from attacking the foreign vessel, the qualities that could trigger the attack were removed. The vein has proved more successful in tests than synthetic or animal-based implants because they are not prone to clotting and don’t pose risk of infection during the surgery.

Incredibly, the veins are made of the same flexible materials that they’re connected to and even take on the properties of their cellular environment and other veins. With the success of this procedure, this emerging field has huge implications for further uses in the medical world. Soon, doctors hope to be bioengineering veins for heart disease and maybe even go on to bioengineer whole organs or body parts.