Current status of developing tissue engineering vascular technologies

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in western countries. Although surgical outcomes for CVD are dramatically improving with the development of surgical techniques, medications, and perioperative management strategies, adverse postoperative events related to the use of artificial prosthetic materials are still problematic. Moreover, in pediatric patients, using these artificial materials make future re-intervention inevitable due to their lack of growth potential.

Areas Covered

This review focuses on the most current tissue-engineering (TE) technologies to treat cardiovascular diseases and discusses their limitations through reports ranging from animal studies to clinical trials.

Expert Opinion

Tissue-engineered structures, derived from a patient’s own autologous cells/tissues and biodegradable polymer scaffolds, can provide mechanical function similar to non-diseased tissue. However, unlike prosthetic materials, tissue-engineered structures are hypothetically more biocompatible and provide growth potential, saving patients from additional or repetitive interventions. While there are many methods being investigated to develop TE technologies in the hopes of finding better options to tackle CVD, most of these approaches are not ready for clinical use or trials. However, tissue engineering has great promise to potentially provide better treatment options to vastly improve cardiovascular surgical outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Cardiovascular disease
• tissue-engineered vascular graft (TEVG)
• vascular reconstruction
• clinical indication of tissue-engineered technique

Article highlights

• Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is one of the leading causes of mortality across the world.

• Tissue engineering (TE) is a new discipline that offers the potential to create replacement structures using with or without autologous cells and biodegradable polymer scaffolds.

• Tissue-engineered structures are hypothetically more biocompatible and provide growth potential, saving patients from additional or repetitive interventions.

• This review focuses on the most current TE technologies to treat CVDs and discusses their limitations through reports ranging from animal studies to clinical trials.

• TE has great promise to potentially provide better treatment options to vastly improve cardiovascular surgical outcomes.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial relationships or otherwise to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

Dr. Shinoka is financially supported by Gunze ltd under Grant number [820342-0322-00].