Tissue engineering: Vascular system

While major advances have been made in the field of clinical vascular surgery, a confounding problem remains that small diameter (< 6 mm) vascular grafts continue to exhibit poor, clinically unacceptable long term patency. The conspicuous complications which lead to this poor performance are the occurrence of intimal hyperplasia and thrombosis. The basic inherent problem with these prosthetic grafts, that is grafts constructed of synthetic polymeric materials (e.g. ePTFE and Dacron), is the relative lack of biocompatibility of these polymeric materials. Numerous solutions have been hypothesized, developed and tested toward improvement in polymeric graft function. Some of these solutions are provided in Table 1.