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Tissue-engineered pulmonary artery transplanted in child.

Japanese surgeons successfully reconstructed a 4-year-old girl's occluded pulmonary artery using a tissue-engineered vessel graft.

The surgical team removed a small segment from one of the child's peripheral veins, cultured the cells from its wall, and expanded them on a biodegradable

polymer scaffold over an 8-week period. No postoperative complications occurred after transplantation, and the surgical team reported that the tissue-engineered vessel was completely patent on follow-up angiography. (New England Journal of Medicine 2001;344:532-533.)

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