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Vascular disease is the number one cause of death for the industrialized nations, outnumbering cancer and AIDS combined.  One of the leading treatments is coronary artery bypass grafting.  With over 600,000 grafts used per year on over 350,000 patients in the United States alone, there is a shortage of viable autologous (from the patient) grafts.  Along with this shortage of autologous grafts, allogenic (from other humans) or xenogenic (from animals) grafts have failed to provide long-term patency.  Polymeric grafts, such as Dacron or PTFE, also suffer from low patency.  Thus, tissue engineering a suitable vascular graft is of interest.

There are four major methods underway for the tissue engineering of a vascular construct:  acellularized xenogeneic tissue, rolled vascular-cell layers, cell seeded polymer scaffolds, and cell seeded collagen gels.  All of these constructs go through remodeling both in vitro during the processing and preconditioning and in vivo with inflammation and immune responses as well as in response to the hemodynamic environment.  Our interest is in determining through what mechanisms this remodeling occurs and how we can control it to allow for a more efficacious construct.  The tissue engineering method that we currently employ is that of cell seeded collagen gels.  We are particularly interested what roll matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) play in the construct remodeling process, both in vitro as well as in vivo.