Stem Cells

Professor Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson, had an easy-to-understand motivation when she started investigating a better way to grow replacement blood vessels. She wanted to save sick children some pain. Sumitran-Holgersson, Professor of Transplantation Biology at Sahlgrenska Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden, had young patients who were missing the vein to connect their livers to their gastrointestinal tract. Her team had built that vein before from stem cells for another patient. Unfortunately, that process required getting bone marrow to get the cells, which causes a lot of pain for the patient. “Drilling in the bone marrow is very painful,” she says. “It occurred to me that there must be a way to obtain the cells from the blood instead.” She and her colleague Michael Olausson, Surgeon/Medical Director of the Transplant Center and Professor at Sahlgrenska Academy found that she was more right that she could have imagined. Together they developed a technique that allows new vessels to be grown from the stem cells in just two tablespoons of blood in less than a week.