CASE REPORT article
Front. Transplant.
Sec. Bioengineering
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frtra.2025.1676566
This article is part of the Research TopicEditor Showcase: BioengineeringView all articles
Lessons Learned from Large Animal Implantation of an All-Natural Tissue Engineered Vascular Graft: A Case Study
Provisionally accepted- 1Wayne State University, Detroit, United States
- 2Henry Ford Health System, Detroit, United States
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Cardiovascular disease continues to be the number one cause of morbidity and mortality across the world. Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) procedures are the most commonly performed major surgery in the U.S. Grafts are difficult to source as patients do not have many site from which to harvest donor tissues as autografts. Plastic grafts have issues of infection and are only used as a last resort. Tissue engineered vascular grafts have potential to solve the need for all-natural vascular grafts in the clinic. In this study, we evaluate the feasibility of a completely biological engineered vascular graft for implantation in a large animal model of a rabbit. An all-biological tissue engineered graft was grown in our laboratory, composed of a tunica adventitia derived from human dermal fibroblasts and a tunica media made from human aortic smooth muscle cells. The all-biological engineered graft exhibited the “look and feel” of a natural vessel. The engineered graft was implanted into the abdominal aorta of a New Zealand rabbit. The graft easily anastomosed to the native abdominal aorta and showed no leakages. Once reperfused, the graft was able to withstand blood flow briefly, prior to exhibiting dissection between the media and adventitia. Color doppler ultrasound showed flow through the abdominal aorta, however, not through the graft region due to the dissected layers creating a blockage. These results support a shift from the traditional paradigm of designing vascular grafts to mimic the multi-layered native structure. The two-layer engineered graft tested here exhibited dissection between the layers, a phenomenon that has yet to be reported in the field to our knowledge. Based on these findings, we recommend a single layer engineered graft to best prevent dissection.
Keywords: Vascular graft, Tissue engineeering, large animal model, Abdominal aorta, Surgery
Received: 30 Jul 2025; Accepted: 18 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Dumitru, Wonski, Cole, Weaver, Carpenter, Kabbani and Lam. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Mai T Lam, mtlam@wayne.edu
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