Engineered tissue constructs can actually induce or augment the body’s own reparative mechanisms, including complex tissue regeneration, researchers at Yale University have found.

The researchers tested whether cells produced in a mouse host’s bone marrow might be a source for new cells. They replaced the bone marrow cells of a female mouse with those of a male mouse and added them to previously designed scaffolds before implanting the graft into female mice.

The researchers found that the cells forming the new vessel were female, meaning they did not come from the male bone marrow cells.

They also implanted a segment of male vessel attached to the scaffold into a female host. After analysis, the researchers found that the side of the graft next to the male segment developed with male vessel wall cells while the side of the graft attached to the female host’s vessel formed from female cells, proving that the cells in the new vessel must have migrated from the adjacent normal vessel.

Ref: Narutoshi Hibino, Gustavo Villalona, Nicholas Pietris, Daniel R. Duncan, Adam Schoffner, Jason D. Roh, Tai Yi, Lawrence W. Dobrucki, Dane Mejias, Rajendra Sawh-Martinez, Jamie K. Harrington, Albert Sinusas, Diane S. Krause, Themis Kyriakides, W. Mark Saltzman, Jordan S. Pober, Toshiharu Shin’oka, Christopher K. Breuer, Tissue-engineered vascular grafts form neovessels that arise from regeneration of the adjacent blood vessel, FASEB Journal, 2011; DOI: 10.1096/fj.11-182246