Tissue engineering a blood vessel

There are many challenges that must be faced if a biological substitute blood vessel is to be developed. Even though it is clear that much progress has been made in just the last decade, there is still much to be done. The result is that one is still approximately a decade away from the day when tissue-engineered substitute blood vessels are clinically used routinely as vascular grafts in coronary bypass surgery. There also continues an additional vascular need, the tissue engineering of prosthetic heart valves