Cardiovascular disease causes blockages of arteries that supply blood to the heart (coronary) and the lower legs (peripheral). Surgical bypass with donor vessels from the patient is the most effective treatment, but these are not always available, leaving surgeons reliant on synthetic materials. Existing commercial materials are made from common plastics like Gore-tex (rain jackets) and PET (drink bottles) and unfortunately, they perform very poorly. With no new materials reaching clinical practice for more than 6 decades, new alternatives are urgently needed.
Tissue engineering has long promised to address this unmet need by developing human blood vessel mimics in the lab. The field continues to face several challenges including poor scalability, long processing times, lack of cost-effectiveness and immunogenicity when using cells and materials from non-patient sources. After a decade of developing technology to generate better vascular materials, we have a series of innovations we believe could make tissue engineered vessels feasible for the first time.
Firstly, using natural materials including silk we have engineered graft scaffolds with tailored mechanical properties, and finely tuned architecture to match human vessels. To increase the bioactivity of these materials we have developed a new nanotechnology that facilitates the functionalisation of graft surfaces with biological cues that can better capture and support cell growth. Importantly, we have also generated an in vitro bioreactor environment that provides customised biological force cues (pressure, flow, shear) to rapidly mature the constructs. This project will bring together these 3 novel elements for the first time, providing important proof-of-concept data to support the capture and maturation of human derived vascular cells into effective tissue engineered grafts.
Last updated21 October 2025