Revolutionary Treatment Could Help Provide Increased Blood Flow to Organs

A new study gives an in-depth look at how it may be possible to create increased blood supply to engineered replacement tissue.

According to the study, next-generation hydrogels may be able to create synthetic scaffolds that could help support the formation of replacement tissues and organs in the emerging area of regenerative medicine. This would involve embedding peptides into the hydrogels, which would stimulate the growth of essential microvascular networks to ensure a good blood supply is created.

New technology could help this process, that involves the functioning of the hydrogels with laminin-derived peptides that can be transplanted in a mouse cornea and were shown to support cell growth and blood vessel formation, according to background information regarding the study.

Lead study author Saniya Ali and coauthors from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, and Duke University, Durham, NC, helped to create this biodegradable hydrogel-based scaffold containing laminins. As peptides are key components of a cell's extracellular matrix, they play a critical role in the attachment process, overall movement and organization of endothelial cells that form the lining of tubules such as blood vessels. Stimulating and controlling the formation and growth of these tubule-like, cell-lined structures is critical to determining if the body will have enough blood supply to major organs and tissues.

Enhancing vascularization in synthetic scaffolds is essential to support the formation of blood vessels in engineered tissues," says BioResearch Open Access Editor Jane Taylor, PhD, MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, via a press release. "The work in this study demonstrates that laminin-derived peptide sequences immobilized in synthetic scaffolds can be used to regulate the formation of microvasculature in tissue-engineered constructs."

More information regarding this study can be found in BioResearch Open Access.