The first tissue-engineered vascular graft (TEVG) was implanted in a child over a decade ago. With cardiovascular diseases becoming more prevalent and the need the limited availability of healthy autologous vessels for bypass grafting procedures, there is an increased need to look for alternative sources to increase treatment efficiency. This has fueled the growth of in vitro vascular tissue engineering field as driven by clinical demand for improved vascular prostheses with performance and durability similar to an autologous blood vessel.”1
Advancements are being made in vitro for testing new methods for vascular graft engineering ranging from seeding cells into decellularized naturally-derived scaffolds to using synthetic scaffolds and testing cell adherence. For such investigations, mimicking in vivo conditions as closely as possible becomes vital and hence primary cultures of endothelial and smooth muscle cells are utilized as ideal cell sources to advance research in this arena.
As an example, the attachment of Lonza HUVEC cells to modified graft surfaces, and their subsequent proliferation, was assessed. The rationale behind this work was centered around the potential for tissue engineered vascular grafts to act as biodegradable scaffold for cells to attach to, proliferate, and provide physiologic functionality. Such a scaffold would eliminate many of the problems associated with permanent synthetic grafts. The authors of the study investigated two endothelialization strategies – antibody immobilization or loading of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). The modified graft surfaces demonstrated superior endothelial cell attachment in vivo, indicating the methodology to offer significant improvements over synthetic alternatives for tissue engineering (Melchiorri et. al)
In a separate study Bastijanic et. al utilized Lonza’s Human pulmonary artery endothelial cells (HPAECs ) and human coronary artery smooth muscle cells (HCASMCs ) and cultured them to 80–90% confluency in endothelial cell growth medium (EGM) or smooth muscle cell growth medium (SmGM), respectively. The cells were integrated individually within synthetic vascular scaffolds to test for cell adherence showing promising results.