UC Merced Research on Growing Blood Vessels Earns NIH Grant

A grant from National Institutes of Health will fund research into using stem cell-derived cells to grow new blood vessels in areas that might have blockages.

The $416,741 grant will fund work by chemical and materials engineering Professor Kara McCloskey, working with co-principal investigator Ngan Huang, a professor in the department of cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford University and principal investigator at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System.

Funding came through NIH's highly competitive R21 grant mechanism under Notice of Special Interest: Bold New Bioengineering Research for Heart, Lung, Blood and Sleep Disorders and Diseases. According to NIH's website, the grants are "intended to encourage exploratory/developmental research by providing support for the early and conceptual stages of project development."

Researchers will explore the ability of specialized stem cell-derived endothelial cells, which in blood vessels, to revascularize limbs that are ischemic, or have restricted blood flow.

Patients with critical limb ischemia, a complication from peripheral artery disease, suffer from severely reduced quality of life and high mortality rates. Clinical trials of restoring blood flow via surgery such as angioplasty and vascular bypass, are associated with some improvement in subsequent amputation-free survival by about six months, but the quality-of-life assessments remain extremely low compared with normal population values.

Cell therapy strategies that can regenerate tissue are under investigation. McCloskey and Huang hypothesize that angiogenic endothelial cells that contain specialized tip cells will robustly revascularize ischemic limbs.

Under this Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award, McCloskey will use highly expandable and potentially patient-specific pluripotent stem cells, or cells that are able to develop into many different types of cells in the body, as the starting cell source and derive specialized endothelial cells. Huang's laboratory will deliver the specialized cells embedded in a unique cell-and growth factor-releasing biomaterial to direct the growth of blood vessels in the hind limbs of rodents.