Tissue engineers are finding ways to grow living organs and tissues from cells, with the aim of replacing diseased and damaged counterparts in the body. Scientists have successfully grown artificial muscles, livers, kidneys, skin, and other tissues. But there’s been no reliable way to engineer precisely patterned networks of blood vessels, some of which can be finer than a human hair. Without a vascular network to deliver nutrients, any artificial tissues, no matter how life-like, can’t function. Now MIT engineers have found they can engineer and control the growth of blood vessels by mechanically stretching them. The team has built a human “blood vessel on a chip,” composed of a central artery made from human endothelial cells, that is embedded in a gel that also contains a small magnet. The researchers studied how the main artery responded as they jostled the gel back and forth using an external magnet to move the magnet embedded within the gel.
Video constructed from a 3D high-resolution microscopy image of engineered blood vessel tissue made by MIT engineers, showing a fly-through of a central artery and new capillaries that sprout from the artery in response to mechanical stimulation.
