Do-it-yourself blood vessels

Private Brisbane biotech VasCam has begun animal trials of a technology that would allow heart-bypass patients, or patients with blocked leg arteries, to grow their own replacement blood vessels.

The Queensland government has awarded VasCam, a University of Queensland spinoff, an $80,000 Innovation Start-up Scheme (ISUS) grant - to help develop its technology for clinical trials in humans. UQ technology transfer company Uniquest will also contribute $20,000.

VasCam's executive chairman, Craig Estwick, said the ISUS grant would allow his company to raise the necessary capital for clinical trials, and do further market research and analysis.

VasCam researchers Professor Julie Campbell and Professor Gordon Campbell, are developing a tubular device, made of a flexible polymer silicone, that will be treated with factors to encourage tissue to form around it.

When tissue has completely covered the tube - a process that takes only two or three weeks - it is removed, and the resulting hollow tube of tissue can be inserted as an arterial graft.

Estwick said that, over time, the graft will become indistinguishable from a natural blood vessel, surrounded by contractile smooth muscle, and with the ability to flex with changing blood pressure - a property called 'compliance'.

Because the grafted artery will form from the patient's own cells, it will be fully biocompatible, and will be accepted by the immune system.

The diameter of the tube - and the resulting blood vessel - can be varied across the full range of diameters required to repair blocked or damaged blood vessels in the body, including small-diameter arteries for heart-bypass operations, which require a close match between the diameters of the graft and the patient's own coronary arteries.

When VasCam has completed pre-clinical trials to develop and refine a safe and effective polymer scaffold, it plans to run a small trial in human volunteers with end-stage renal disease.