Polyester vascular patches acquire arterial or venous identity depending on their environment

Journal of Biomedical Materials Research - Part A

3 years ago

Polyester vascular patches acquire arterial or venous identity depending on their environment

Maryam Ige, Toshihiko Isaji, Jianming Guo, Alan Dardik, Tambudzai Kudze, Ying Xing, Hualong Bai, Tun Wang, Haidi Hu, Bogdan Yatsula, Haiyang Liu, Hashimoto Takuya

Polyester is commonly used in vascular surgery for patch angioplasty and grafts. We hypothesized that polyester patches heal by infiltration of arterial or venous progenitor cells depending on the site of implantation. Polyester patches were implanted to the Wistar rat aorta or inferior vena cava and explanted on days 7 or 30. Neointima that formed on polyester patches was thicker in the venous environment compared to the amount that formed on patches in the arterial environment. Venous patches had more cell proliferation and greater numbers of VCAM-positive and CD68-positive cells, whereas arterial patches had greater numbers of vimentin-positive and alpha-actin-positive cells. Although there were similar numbers of endothelial progenitor cells in the neointimal endothelium, cells in the arterial patch were Ephrin-B2- and notch-4-positive while those in the venous patch were Eph-B4- and COUP-TFII-positive. Venous patches treated with an arteriovenous fistula had decreased neointimal thickness; however, neointimal endothelial cells expressed Ephrin-B2 and notch-4 in addition to Eph-B4 and COUP-TFII. Polyester patches in the venous environment acquire venous identity, whereas patches in the arterial environment acquire arterial identity; patches in the fistula environment acquire dual arterial-venous identity. This data suggests that synthetic patches heal by acquisition of identity of their environment. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Publisher URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi

DOI: 10.1002/jbm.a.36193