Pig embryos with human vessels
Human blood vessels began to grow in the body of pigs
A team of researchers from the University of Minnesota has tested a new approach to growing human blood vessels. It will allow you to get an unlimited number of vessels for transplantation, while the risk of rejection will be minimized.
Scientists have long known that human physiology has much in common with the physiology of pigs, so the latter often act as models for the development and testing of various drugs and treatment strategies.
In the course of the new work, the team tried to grow human blood vessels in a pig's body.
The specialists obtained mature skin cells of the patient and reprogrammed them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), giving rise to endothelial cells. The latter, we recall, line the inner surface of the vessels.
The resulting iPSCs were injected into a pig embryo, and it was placed with a surrogate mother.
A drawing from the press release of the University of Minnesota first to prove a new method to grow human blood vessels – VM.
In the first phase of the trial, the embryo developed for 27 days. No non-targeted effects were found, all endothelial cells were of human origin.
The team believes that it has proven the validity of its concept, and is now awaiting approval for further embryo research in the later stages of pregnancy.
According to the scientists' idea, their technique will make it possible to obtain viable piglets with blood vessels that will exactly match the vessels of each individual patient awaiting transplantation. Thus, after surgery, a person will not need to take immunosuppressants – drugs for artificial suppression of immunity.
The authors hope that their approach will help patients with many chronic and incurable diseases requiring organ transplantation, as well as patients with peripheral artery damage, for example, due to smoking or diabetes (in many cases, such a disease leads to amputation of limbs).
A scientific article based on the results of this work is presented in the journal Nature Biotechnology (Das et al., Generation of human endothelium in pig embryos deficient in ETV2).
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