Coronary heart disease is the leading cause of death in Ireland as the arteries that provides the heart with oxygen become blocked up with plaque. After a heart attack, the biggest challenge is where these arteries become totally blocked with plaque and their heart fails. These patients have a very poor quality of life as they can’t even climb a flight of stairs. The surgeons won’t operate on them as they wouldn’t survive the operation and the other technique called PCI which is where we use a balloon to open up the arteries often fails or bursts the artery in these patients. So at the moment these patients are just given a few tablets and left to die slowly at home. One option is use of novel devices that actually get the heart to grow it’s own bypasses around the blockages without the major risks of PCI. However these devices have only been tested in animals and we can’t just jump into testing them in humans. We need a middle ground to make sure that they work and are safe. My project is to provide this middle ground i.e. an artificial blood vessel in which we can test these stents as well as other drugs acting on blood vessels. I will make an artifical tunnel out of a special gel just like the substance that your own arteries grow in and and I will get endothelial cells to grow around the inside of the tunnel to make an artery.
