Yarn grown from human skin cells could be used to make implantable “human textiles” for tissue grafts or organ repair.
“We can sew pouches, create tubes, valves and perforated membranes,” says Nicholas L’Heureux, who led the work at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Bordeaux. “With the yarn, any textile approach is feasible: knitting, braiding, weaving, even crocheting.”
Synthetic materials used for stitches and scaffolds for growing tissue grafts can often trigger an immune response, causing inflammation that can complicate healing. Surgeons can use dissolvable materials to reduce this risk, but these aren’t great for complex tissue reconstruction if they fail prematurely.
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The human yarn avoids that by remaining undetected by the immune system. It builds on by L’Heureux’s team that used human skin fibroblast cells to produce sheets of material that could be rolled into tubes to make artificial blood vessels.
To spin the yarn, the team cut such sheets into ribbons and twisted them to form threads. These were then intertwined to create yarns of different mechanical strengths that could be dried and spooled until required.
To show its potential, the researchers seeded individual threads with different blood vessel cells and braided them together. They also used the yarn as a stitch to close a wound on a rat that healed after 14 days.
Another experiment used a custom-made loom to weave a strong and implantable textile tube. When grafted into a sheep’s artery, it showed no leaks and kept blood flowing normally. “With a textile approach, once you’re done assembling, it’s ready to wear,” says L’Heureux.
“This intriguing investigation takes an initial step into appropriately scaled, mechanically tough constructs that will quietly integrate into and even become part of the host repair, a combination that has so far eluded bioengineers,” says Jeffrey Ruberti, who investigates collagen-based biomaterials at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Acta Biomaterialia
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