Lab-grown small blood vessels ‘indicate treatment for major cause of stroke’

FYI.

Lab-grown small blood vessels ‘indicate treatment for major cause of stroke’

Dr Alessandra Granata, from the department of clinical neurosciences at Cambridge – who led the study, said: “Despite the number of people affected worldwide by small vessel disease, we have little in the way of treatments because we don’t fully understand what damages the blood vessels and causes the disease.

“Most of what we know about the underlying causes tends to come from animal studies, but they are limited in what they can tell us.

“That’s why we turned to stem cells to generate cells of the brain blood vessels and create a disease model ‘in a dish’ that mimics what we see in patients.”

Research suggests cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) is a leading cause of age-related cognitive decline and contributes to almost half (45%) of dementia cases worldwide.

It is also responsible for one in five (20%) ischemic strokes – the most common type of stroke – where a blood clot prevents the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain.

Conditions such as high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes are associated with the majority of SVD cases and tend to affect people in their middle age.

But there are also some rare, inherited forms of the disease that can strike people at a younger age, often in their mid-thirties.

Using cells taken from skin biopsies of patients with one of these rare forms of SVD, which is caused by a mutation in a gene called COL4, scientists at the Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Heart and Lung Research Institute, University of Cambridge, created their lab grown vessels.