doi: 10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.108.180604
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© 2008 American Heart Association, Inc.
Editorials |
Therapeutic Vasculogenesis
It Takes Two
From the Cardiovascular Division, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.
Correspondence to Richard T. Lee, MD, Partners Research Facility, 65 Landsdowne Street, Room 279, Cambridge, MA 02139. E-mail rlee@partners.org
See related article, pages 194–202
Key Words: bone marrow stromal cell • endothelial cells • tissue engineering • vasculogenesis
An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract. |
The shortage of organs for transplantation has been so severe and prolonged that many of us have become almost numb to the crisis facing patients and their families. In 2008, there are 98 992 patients on various organ transplantation waiting lists in the United States alone; during January and February, 4471 transplants were performed but 1044 patients died while on waiting lists.1 This organ crisis shines an unwanted spotlight on the failure of tissue engineering to thus far deliver on its promises of the late 20th century.
Tissue engineering in the 21st century still has the same potential, in some ways rediscovering itself under the more reputable moniker of "Regenerative Medicine." However, some of the problems that kept tissue engineering from delivering the goods in the 1990s remain important ones in this century. One of the critical challenges in building any new organ is the dependence of an implanted tissue construct on sufficient oxygen and nutrient transport for its cells to survive, both for access to substrate molecules and clearance of products of metabolism.2 The principal mechanism for this transport, especially for small molecules, is passive diffusion along concentration gradients, and oxygen diffusion is of obvious importance. The transport of other nutrients is generally more favorable than that of oxygen because the diffusion of oxygen is relatively slow, consumption is high, and the tolerated time for any deficit is so short.
To provide sufficient oxygen tension to mitochondria inside the cell, the minimum distance from the cell to the closest
Related Article:
Circ. Res. 2008 103: 194-202.
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