Additive manufacturing may offer a treatment option for ischemia – narrowed or blocked blood vessels that could lead to heart attack and other serious conditions. A 3D-printed patch infused with endothelial cells was developed to promote growth of new vessels in patients who are not candidates for surgical repair.
Researchers from Boston University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston, MA), and Stanford University (CA) sought to remedy the problem of disorganized, inefficient vessel networks produced by current administration of growth factor injections.
Two patches were tested: one where the cells were pre-organized into a specific architecture and another where the cells were simply injected without any organizational structure. In vivo results confirmed the patches with pre-organized structure reflected a marked improvement in reducing the prevalence of ischemia, while the patches with no organization resulted in more chaotic vessel development.
To 3D print vessels on such a small scale — 100 microns, small enough for tiny blood vessels — the researchers 
turned to Innolign, a Boston biomedical technology company. The technology allows for scalability, which will be helpful going forward as they move to test their designs in larger, more complex organisms and tissue environments.
Future work will focus on patch scalability as well as different architectures to see if there is a structure that works even better than what has been tried so far.
