Scientists grow human blood vessels in lab

Scientists at The University of British Columbia have managed to grow “perfect” human blood vessels in the lab for the first time, raising the possibility of new treatments for vascular problems.

Josef Penninger and his colleagues have developed a method to grow three-dimensional human blood vessels (organoids) in a petri dish.

An organoid is grown from stem cells and mimics an organ, which can be used to study that organ in the lab. When researchers transplanted the blood vessel organoids into mice, they found that they developed into perfectly functional human blood vessels including arteries and capillaries.

The discovery illustrates that it’s possible to not only engineer blood vessel organoids from human stem cells in a dish, but also to grow a functional human vascular system in another species.