Tissue Engineering

Tissue Engineering and Fetal Medicine: A New Frontier for Congenital Heart Disease
Tissue Engineering and Fetal Medicine: A New Frontier for Congenital Heart Disease 1024 575 Abbie Miller
Fetus in utero receiving valvuloplasty

Procedures that utilize cardiac catheterization to improve fetal heart development are often successful, but they are not without risk. And even if they can successfully prevent the development of single ventricle disease, there is always ongoing heart valve disease (HVD). HVD may not be as life-threatening as single ventricle disease, but it requires lifelong care.…

Findings Show TEVG Stenosis Spontaneously Resolves
Findings Show TEVG Stenosis Spontaneously Resolves 600 400 Katie Brind'Amour, PhD, MS, CHES
Tissue engineered vascular graft

The complication that halted a clinical trial for tissue-engineered vascular grafts for children with congenital heart disease may reverse spontaneously without clinical complications. Based on promising laboratory and animal modeling of a biodegradable scaffold seeded with a patient’s own cells, a clinician-scientist research team now based at Nationwide Children’s Hospital initiated a pediatric tissue engineered…

Using Computer Models to Predict How Tissue Engineered Vascular Grafts Will Work
Using Computer Models to Predict How Tissue Engineered Vascular Grafts Will Work 150 150 Kevin Mayhood

Model and experimental data strongly suggest testing TEVGs until scaffold has biodegraded Identical tissue engineered vascular grafts (TEVGs) being tested in small-diameter veins and arteries of a mouse model performed well for 12 weeks. At 14 weeks, all TEVGs in the veins continued performing well, but all in the arteries suddenly failed. During their effort to understand…

Why Do Synthetic Tracheal Replacements Fail?
Why Do Synthetic Tracheal Replacements Fail? 150 150 Lauren Dembeck

Synthetic tracheal replacements experience infectious, inflammatory and mechanical failures. Tracheal defects in children and adults can often be addressed with current surgical techniques. However, when a defect is large, greater than 50% of an adult windpipe or 30% of a pediatric windpipe, few options exist to repair it without donor tissue. For decades, tissue engineers…

From What-if to Widely Available – A Proposed Path for Tissue Engineered Vascular Grafts
From What-if to Widely Available – A Proposed Path for Tissue Engineered Vascular Grafts 150 150 Abbie Miller

What if you could utilize tissue engineering, imaging and 3D printing technologies to bring the benefits of a tissue engineered vascular graft to every child who needs one? Children born with a single ventricle heart defect undergo a series of surgeries and procedures to reroute the blood flow through their heart. The Fontan operation is…

Growing Tissue to Help Children With Short Bowel Syndrome
Growing Tissue to Help Children With Short Bowel Syndrome 1024 575 Kevin Mayhood

Research using a small animal model shows that it matters where in the body the cultured intestine is grown. Researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital are hoping to use short bowel syndrome patients’ own cells to grow extra tissue needed for their small intestine to function properly. Using rat models, the team of physician-scientists found that…

A Key to Preventing Stenosis in Tissue-Engineered Vascular Grafts
A Key to Preventing Stenosis in Tissue-Engineered Vascular Grafts 600 400 Kevin Mayhood
Tissue engineered vascular graft

Seeding a high number of bone marrow mononuclear cells on graft appears to prevent narrowing. Tissue-engineered vascular grafts hold promise for children with congenital heart disease because the grafts, which carry a patient’s own cells, have the potential to grow and regenerate just as the child’s blood vessels do. But over time, some grafts develop…

A Narrow Focus: Perfecting Tissue Engineered Vascular Grafts
A Narrow Focus: Perfecting Tissue Engineered Vascular Grafts 1024 575 Abbie Miller
image of heart with fontan conduit highlighted

A pair of surgeon-researchers is perfecting tissue engineered vascular grafts through bench, clinical and computational modeling studies.