Statement of Purpose: Small-caliber vascular grafts with the diameter smaller than 4 mm are still unavailable because of the acute thrombogenic formation and the subsequent rapid stenosis. Recently, we have succeeded to get high patency of small diameter vascular grafts with the inner dimameter of 2 mm and length of 25cm. This includes two important points: one is decellularization by ultrahigh hydrostatic pressure (UHP) treatment in the decellularization process without using any detergent and the other is the luminal surface modification with endothelial progenitor cell (EPC)-specific peptides. The latter was essential and unmodified grafts cannot be patent due to the severe clotting. The reason why we employed the UHP treatment is that the detergents, which are usually used for decellularization process, may lead to severe denaturation of extracellular matrices and suppress the recellularization. However the UHP treatment without using detergent must also affect the ECM structure and activity resulting in their denaturation. We have been applying the UHP treatment method to the other tissues and studying its effect on cells, tissues, ECM components, enzymatic activities, and the performance of acellular biological tissues.
展开▼
