Tissue engineering of vascular bypass grafts: Role of endothelial cell extraction

Surgical treatment of vascular disease has become common. The use of synthe tic materials is limited to grafts larger than 5-6 mm, because of the frequ ency of occlusion observed with small-diameter prosthetics. An alternative would be a hybrid or tissue-engineered graft with the surface coated with a monolayer of the patients' own endothelial cells. This review examines the various techniques and technologies used to date in order to extract endot helial cells for such graft engineering.