UBC and European scientists grow human blood vessels in lab with breakthrough technology

Scientists have grown "perfect" human blood vessels in a laboratory for the first time, according to a paper published recently.

The engineering technique, which could, potentially, revolutionize research into vascular diseases such as diabetes and Alzheimer's, is outlined in a paper published January 16 in Nature by a scientific team whose senior author is Josef Penninger, director of UBC's Life Sciences Institute.

Other paper authors are affiliated with Vienna, Austria's Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Molecular Pathology, and Medical University Vienna. Also contributing were researchers from the Center for Molecular Medicine (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute) and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and the U.K.-based Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Penninger and his fellow researchers grew "vascular organoids" from stem cells in a petri dish. Organoids are 3-D forms that mimic organs and are utilized to study different aspects of such structures' natural counterparts. Those organoids "strikingly" mimicked "the structure and function of real human blood vessels", according to a January 16 UBC news release.

"When researchers transplanted the blood vessel organoids into mice, they found that they developed into perfectly functional human blood vessels including arteries and capillaries," the release noted.

"The discovery illustrates that it is possible to not only engineer blood vessel organoids from human stem cells in a dish, but also to grow a functional human vascular system in another species."

Penninger said in the release that the breakthrough could have research applications for a number of diseases, including diabetes, which afflicts some 420 million people worldwide and can lead to heart disease, stroke, blindness, amputations, and kidney failure because of poor blood circulation and low oxygen levels.

“Being able to build human blood vessels as organoids from stem cells is a game changer,” said Penninger, who is also the Canada 150 Research Chair in Functional Genetics and founding director of the Institute for Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA).

“Every single organ in our body is linked with the circulatory system. This could potentially allow researchers to unravel the causes and treatments for a variety of vascular diseases, from Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular diseases, wound healing problems, stroke, cancer and, of course, diabetes.”

The Nature paper's first author, Reiner Wimmer, a postdoctoral research fellow at IMBA, said in the UBC article that the near-perfect duplication of human blood vessels for research purposes was the highlight of the project.

"“What is so exciting about our work is that we were successful in making real human blood vessels out of stem cells...Our organoids resemble human capillaries to a great extent, even on a molecular level, and we can now use them to study blood vessel diseases directly on human tissue.”