Scientists have managed to grow human blood vessels in a petri dish

As something that connects all the organs of our body, through the circulatory system, the blood vessels are damn important. Now, a team of researchers has succeeded in producing for the first time in the laboratory human blood vessels of perfect image quality, and even to successfully implant them in living mice. The results could change the game for the treatment of diabetes.

"We have succeeded for the first time in developing human blood vessels from stem cells, using advanced bioengineering over many years of trial and error," said Josef Penninger, Life Sciences Director. Institute of the University of British Columbia at Digital Trends. "Capillary blood vessels resemble, smell and taste human blood vessels: we call them organelles of blood vessels. We then used these organelles of blood vessels to model the prototypical disease of small blood vessels in diabetes. We successfully established a diabetic medium in a Petri dish that allowed us, for the first time, to model these changes in diabetic blood vessels. Most importantly, we also grew a human vascular tree in experimental mice, [resulting in] a mouse with a perfect blood system. "

During this process, researchers have identified a key pathway that can prevent changes in blood vessels. These changes not only contribute to the onset of diabetes, but are also a major cause of death and morbidity. Being able to make "diabetic" organoids in the laboratory means having a new model that will make it easier to identify new treatments.

Getting close to treating any disease is exciting, but diabetes affects a considerable number of people – estimated at 420 million people worldwide. However, little has previously been understood about the vascular changes that occur in diabetics.

In addition to finding new treatments for diabetes, Mr. Penninger said there were other potential uses for this new work of rupture.

"I think we could use the organoids of blood vessels as grafts to improve wound healing, by making patients" young blood vessels "," he said. "Thanks to our experiments on mice, we know that we can access the circulatory system and specify, even for arteries and venules, a true vascular tree. This is not magic like so many other stem cell therapies promised because you can simply insert them into the wound and dress them up. The surgeons came to see me [and said that] Such grafts could be used to improve healing during bone or cartilage surgeries where the healing process is often slow because there are very few blood vessels around. "

An article describing the work was recently published in the journal Nature.