Medical technology: A not-so-hard graft

February 4, 2011

ANOTHER advance in the emerging technology of regenerative medicine has just been announced. It should soon be possible to make blood vessels that can be stored and used “off the shelf” for surgery that requires arteries or veins to be bypassed. The vessels, prototypes of which are described this week in a paper in Science Translational Medicine, are made by Humacyte, a small firm based in Durham, North Carolina, that was founded by Shannon Dahl, the paper’s principal author, and two colleagues. (The Economist)