Scientists at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have succeeded for the first time in history in printing functioning blood vessels using 3D technology. Advances in 3D printing have long captured the attention of the health care field due to its potential to improve treatment for certain medical conditions.
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Technion researchers succeeded in printing small and large blood vessels, in particular, that are crucial for supplying blood to implanted tissue. The study was headed by Professor Shulamit Levenberg and was conducted by doctoral student Dr. Ariel Alejandro Szklanny and colleagues from Technion, the Czech Republic, and the United States.
In the study, which has been published in the Advanced Materials scientific journal, Szklanny printed small and large blood vessels – as opposed to medium-sized ones previously used in the medical community – to form a system that contained a functional combination of both.
In the human body, the heart pumps blood into the aorta, which then branches out into progressively smaller blood vessels, transporting oxygen and nutrients to all the tissues and organs.
Transplanted tissue needs similar support of blood vessels, and consequently, so does tissue engineered for transplantation. Until now, experiments with engineered tissue containing hierarchical vessel networks have involved an intermediary step of transplanting first into a healthy limb, allowing the tissue to be permeated by the host's blood vessels, and then transplanting the structure into the affected area.
Szklanny's achievement might make the intermediary step unnecessary.
The vessels were then implanted in a rat, attached to its femoral artery. Blood flowing through it did what blood is supposed to do: spread throughout the entire vessel network and supplied blood to the tissue without leaking from the blood vessels.
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