A breakthrough for dialysis patients

Three dialysis patients have received the world's first blood vessels grown in a lab from donated skin cells. It's a key step toward creating a supply of ready-to-use arteries and veins that could be used to treat diabetics, soldiers with damaged limbs, people having heart bypass surgery and others.

The goal is to one day have a refrigerated inventory of these in various sizes and shapes that surgeons could order as needed like bandages and other medical supplies.

Three patients in Poland have received the new vessels, which are working well two to eight months later. But doctors are excited because this builds on earlier success in about a dozen patients given blood vessels grown in the lab from their own skin -- a process too long and expensive to be practical.

"This version, built from a master donor, is available off the shelf and at a dramatically reduced cost," from $6,000 to $10,000, said Todd McAllister, chief of Cytograft Tissue Engineering Inc., the San Francisco-area company leading the work.

The research is considered so promising that the American Heart Association featured it Monday in the first of a new series of webcasts about cutting-edge science.

"This is tremendously exciting," because the failure of blood vessels used in dialysis is "a huge public health problem," said Duke University's Dr. Robert Harrington, a heart expert who had no role in the work. If a larger study getting under way now in Europe and South America shows success, "this is big news," Harrington said.

Kidney failure, which is common in diabetics, requires dialysis to filter wastes from the blood through a connection between an artery and a vein called a shunt. It gets punctured several times a week to hook patients up to the dialysis machine, and complications include blood clots, clogging and infection. Patients often run out of suitable sites for these shunts as problems develop.

The lab-grown vessels are free of artificial materials and do not use stem cells. Researchers start with a snip of skin from the back of a hand, remove cells and grow them into sheets of tissue that are rolled up like straws to form blood vessels.