LONDON, Jan. 1 (UPI) -- British doctors say they will begin human trials in 2010 of a revolutionary spaghetti-like artificial artery in heart bypass surgery.
The artificial blood vessel will negate the need to surgically graft a bypass patient's own vein. Professor Alexander Seifalian, of University College London, who created the new vessel, said almost 30 percent of heart bypass patients do not have a vein usable for bypass, Britain's Daily Mail reported Friday.
"In these cases, there's not much doctors can do and patients often die," he said. "So we have developed an artificial artery using nanotechnology. Once the stem cells are attracted to it, they cover the whole inside of it and turn into endothelial cells," Seifalian said.
The vessel has a coating inside made up of a million tiny spikes less than one-thousandth the width of a human hair, Seifalian explained. They grow inside the man-made artery and join together to make a smooth, healthy lining found in living blood vessels, which makes the artery elastic and prevents clots from forming, the Mail reported.
Aside from holding back clots, using an artificial artery means heart patients would not have to undergo a second operation for doctors to obtain a vein to use for the bypass.
The British Wellcome Trust has given researchers a grant of more than $800,000 to start human trials this year, the newspaper reported.
"We welcome this interesting development, which could potentially be of enormous benefits to patients who need a bypass operation to treat their coronary heart disease," said Judy O'Sullivan of the British Heart Foundation.
