April 2nd, 2004
Towards Cultured Blood Vessels
The Daily Yomiuri reports that Japanese researchers have succeeded in growing correctly-structured capillary blood vessels from embryonic stem cells. All advances in the techniques of tissue engineering relating to growing blood vessels are important at this time, as they are required for efforts to grow large scale tissue structures - like replacement organs - on demand. When matched with existing tissue engineering techniques involving scaffolds, it's clear that we should be seeing rapid advances in this field in the next year or two. Few advances will happen in the US while politicians are trying to ban this form of medical research, however.