Project 454869

With over 17 million annual deaths, cardiovascular diseases remain the leading cause of mortality worldwide, and in Canada alone are responsible for one-third of the total annual deaths. A heart attack is characterized by a reduced blood flow because of clogging in one or more arteries that feed the heart, which results in irreversible cell death and heart muscle loss. Bypass surgeries are commonly performed to restore blood supply to the heart muscle. In the US over 400,000 and in Canada over 15,000 coronary artery bypass graft surgeries are performed every year. For graft sizes smaller than 6 mm in diameter, harvesting other arteries from the patient remains the gold standard for surgical purposes. However, those grafts have drawbacks, with as many as 30% of patients lacking a suitable conduit for the first-time surgery, and up to 50% for the second surgery. Promising approaches have been developed in the last decade for small-size vascular graft fabrication. However, none of these has translated to the clinic, mainly due to their failure over time, the complexity, length of time required to produce a graft, and inability to mimic the size and shape of the patient's vessels. Therefore, there is an urgency to develop personalized new "on the spot", cost-effective, and easy to produce in situ small vascular grafts that can help the thousands of Canadians every year who do not qualify for bypass surgery. Our approach proposes to develop and innovate size-shape personalized grafts that can be produced during the surgery, mimicking all the mechanical and biological responses of human vascular grafts.