The longest follow-up among these patients has been for 13 months. Cytograft says the vessels hold promise for patients with damaged blood vessels from diabetes, arteriosclerosis, birth defects and other problems. But monitoring for a much longer period will be needed before those uses could become standard, the team said.

“This technique has a big potential in the vascular surgical field,” said Dr. Toshiharu Shinoka, who directs pediatric cardiovascular surgery at Yale and who plans to conduct studies with Cytograft on the new vessel. He called the technique an advance over one he used in operations on children in Japan, in which vessels were grown from cells on a scaffold that then degraded and was absorbed into the body.

Doctors not connected with the company agreed on the importance of the new technique. “A potential benefit may be for infants and children with congenital heart defects,” said Dr. Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease at the University of California, San Francisco. Unlike grafts from cadavers, he added, “the Cytograft vessels should be able to grow as the child does.”

The Cytograft studies were done at a leading cardiovascular center in Argentina, where medical costs are much lower than in the United States. The patients were all receiving chronic kidney dialysis, which cleanses wastes from the blood.

Image Credit... Cytograft

As is standard for such treatment, doctors had surgically cut an artery and a vein in the forearm and joined them in a link known as a shunt, which provides access for the repeated needle punctures needed to connect a patient to a dialysis machine. Such shunts can last up to 15 years. But when clots and infections develop in the shunts to reduce or stop blood flow, new ones must be created.