Now, researchers in Institute Professor Robert Langer's lab at MIT have used a novel cocktail of cells to coax muscle tissue to develop its own vascular network, a process called pre-vascularization. When implanted in living mice and rats, these tissues integrated more robustly with the body's own tissues than similar implants without blood vessels.
"What's even more exciting than being able to make skeletal muscles for reconstructive surgery or to repair congenitally defective muscles, for instance, is that this a generic approach that can be applied towards making other complex tissues. It could allow us to do really wonderful things," says collaborator Daniel Kohane, an affiliate at MIT and assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
The researchers published their work in Nature Biotechnology, available online in advance on June 19, 2005. An accompanying News and Views commentary says this "landmark paper" provides "a compelling demonstration of the benefits of pre-vascularization for engineering larger pieces of tissue."
"When I came to work with Bob Langer for my postdoc, it was my dream to vascularize a tissue," recalls first author Shulamit Levenberg, who is now on the faculty of the biomedical engineering department at Technion in Haifa, Israel where she completed these studies. She chose to tackle muscles, since they depend on blood vessels interspersed with muscle fibers and also serve as a model for highly vascularized organs such as the liver, heart, and lung.
Levenberg theorized she needed to combine three cell types: myoblasts that f
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Contact: Elizabeth Thomson
thomson@mit.edu
617-258-5402
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
20-Jun-2005