Scientists have for the first time grown functioning human blood vessel organoids from stem cells in the lab. Their study, published on Wednesday (January 16) in Nature, offers researchers the possibility of studying diseases related to the vascular system, such as stroke and diabetes, in an easy-to-manipulate model in a petri dish.
“Being able to build human blood vessels as organoids from stem cells is a game changer,” study coauthor Josef Penninger, director of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of British Columbia, says in a statement. “Every single organ in our body is linked with the circulatory system [so] this could potentially allow researchers to unravel the causes and treatments for a variety of vascular diseases.”
To test the function of the vessels they’d created, the researchers transplanted organoids into immunodeficient mice. The lab-grown vessels connected up to the mice’s circulatory system, and even began growing into more-complex ...
