Andres García León is the head of the Angiology and Vascular Surgery service at Valme Hospital in Seville.
As Garcia explains medical writingThe project is “a network between different hospitals in Andalusia and the many teams involved”, a . with the support of multidisciplinary team: From clinical professionals to experts in technology and regulation.
The selection of Hospital Valme to coordinate the project began in 2017 with a call from Swedish company VeriGraft AB, which already had results from animal studies and decided to contact García León and his team as a result of their experience. did. ,
How are custom vein transplants performed? This is the technology used
using tissue engineering techniques “We take a healthy vein from a deceased donor patientwhich would normally not be useful for other types of reconstruction” and the said donor cell is terminated with the bioreactor. Afterwards, “we decellularize the healthy vein” and when we have the recipient, we do a show peripheral blood draw, “like when you donate blood”, and with it it is reimplanted in the bioreactor. “That is, one is always made of cells, we turn a foreign vein into ours,” Garcia explains to this paper.
In addition, after discharge, scheduled two or three days after the intervention, the patient must adhere to a anticoagulant treatment For one year, the functionality of the implant is verified during that time, and a follow-up is performed to verify the viability of this vascular segment where implanted.
How are suitable patients identified?
Candidate patients are those patients who come for angiology and vascular surgery consultation and through ultrasound, a femoral vein disease And they are diagnosed with a deep venous insufficiency. “Afterwards, a range of risk factors for the operation must be ruled out,” says the doctor.
The trial, which is currently in the first phase in Spain, has already conducted its first intervention at the Virgen de las Nieves Hospital, a collaborative research centre, after receiving authorization from the Medicines and Health Products Agency in December 2020. The full study will include 14 more patients aged 18 to 75 years with chronic venous insufficiency of the deep venous system.
According to Garcia Leone this therapy “Provides a guarantee of future success”As “to date the only therapeutic route offered to these patients was wearing a strong compression elastic stocking for life or unsuccessful attempts at surgical reconstruction of diseased vein valves”.
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