Cardiovascular Diseases To the Editor: We read with interest the review by Nugent and Edelman.1 The authors have discussed seeding of prosthetic vascular graft but have not commented on the difference between single-stage and two-stage seeding. Single-stage seeding involves extraction of endothelial cells (ECs), coating of graft lumen, and implanting the graft into the patient, all within the t...

BACKGROUND Cartilage tissue engineering is a promising approach for repairing and regenerating cartilage tissue. To date, attempts have been made to construct zonal cartilage that mimics the cartilaginous matrix in different zones. However, little attention has been paid to the chondrocyte density gradient within the articular cartilage. We hypothesized that the chondrocyte density gradient pla...

Many cell lines are sensitive to growth at low cell density and undergo apoptosis induced by oxidative stress if the cell density is decreased below a critical threshold. In stable transfection experiments this cell density-dependent growth may be the limiting factor, since during drug selection the cell density falls below the critical threshold, precluding outgrowth of transfected clones. We ...

This clinical study was performed to investigate the patency rate of endothelial cell-seeded small-diameter expanded polytetrafluoroethylene grafts during coronary artery bypass surgery. Between September 1995 and December 1998, 14 patients (median age: 71 years, range: 61-79 years) received 21 endothelial cell-seeded small-diameter grafts. In all, 43% of the performed implantations were reoper...

It is very important to understand the onset and growth pattern of breast primary tumours as well as their metastatic dissemination. In most cases, it is the metastatic disease that ultimately kills the patient. There is increasing evidence that cancer stem cells are closely linked to the progression of the metastatic tumour. Here, we investigate stem cell seeding to an avascular tumour site us...

Tissue engineering has been developed as a new approach in regenerating tissues and organs using cells and scaffolds. An important element in successful tissue engineering in vitro is a suitable bioreactor system (Freed and Vunjak-Novakovic 1997). In general, some types of bioreactors have been used for cell culture on polymer scaffolds, namely spinner flasks, rotating vessels, and perfusion sy...

Nonobese diabetic/severe combined immune deficiency (NOD/SCID) mouse repopulating cells (SRC) have been proposed to represent a more primitive human stem cell subset than the cobblestone area-forming cell (CAFC) week (wk) 6 or the long-term culture-initiating cell (LTC-IC) wk 5 on the basis of their difference in frequency, phenotype, transfectibility, and multilineage outgrowth potential in im...

Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) have been used as a rapid and efficient technique for driving microparticles into a three-dimensional scaffold matrix, raising the possibility that SAW may be effective in seeding live cells into scaffolds, that is, if the cells were able to survive the infusion process. Primary osteoblast-like cells were used to specifically address this issue: To investigate the ...