MIT scientists develop a new way to grow artificial blood vessels

Artificial tissues can mimic muscle, liver, kidney and skin, but they still face a basic survival problem: cells need blood vessels. Without a dense vascular network, oxygen and nutrients cannot reach deep into engineered tissue, and waste cannot escape.MIT engineers have now shown that mechanical stretching can help solve that problem. By repeatedly pulling on a lab-grown vessel, they increased the growth of new capillary-like sprouts and guided the direction those sprouts followed.The work, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, introduces a vessel-on-a-chip platform that uses magnets to apply controlled strain inside a three-dimensional tissue model.