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MIT News
MIT engineers find a precise way to grow artificial blood vessels
MIT engineers find a precise way to grow artificial blood vessels
Gently stretching and pulling a “blood vessel on a chip” encourages controlled sprouting of new vessels, for possible use in artificial tissues or organs.
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Jennifer Chu<br>MIT News
Publication Date:
July 14, 2026
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With mechanical stretching, MIT engineers can control how artificial arteries sprout new capillaries.
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Credit: Courtesy of the researchers
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Caption:
With mechanical stretching, MIT engineers can control how artificial arteries sprout new capillaries.
Credits:
Credit: Courtesy of the researchers
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Tissue engineers are finding ways to grow living organs and tissues from cells, with the aim of replacing diseased and damaged counterparts in the body. Scientists have successfully grown artificial muscles, livers, kidneys, skin, and other tissues. But there’s been no reliable way to engineer precisely patterned networks of blood vessels, some of which can be finer than a human hair.<br>Without a vascular network to deliver nutrients, any artificial tissues, no matter how life-like, can’t function.<br>Now MIT engineers have found they can engineer and control the growth of blood vessels by mechanically stretching them.<br>The team has built a human “blood vessel on a chip,” composed of a central artery made from human endothelial cells, that is embedded in a gel that also contains a small magnet. The researchers studied how the main artery responded as they jostled the gel back and forth using an external magnet to move the magnet embedded within the gel.
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Video constructed from a 3D high-resolution microscopy image of engineered blood vessel tissue made by MIT engineers, showing a fly-through of a central artery and new capillaries that sprout from the artery in response to mechanical stimulation.
They found that the simple mechanical action of repeatedly jostling the artery stimulated the artery to sprout other, smaller capillaries. By changing the direction in which the artery is jostled or stretched, the researchers could redirect the growing new vessels. And stretching the artery by various degrees influenced how many more new vessels sprouted.<br>Their results, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer scientists a new way to engineer artificial blood vessels and program the patterns in which they grow.<br>“Healthy tissues depend on organized blood vessel networks, but state-of-the-art protocols don't enable fabricating such networks within engineered tissues,” says Ritu Raman, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and the study’s co-lead author. “The ability to program blood vessel growth with physical cues may enable reproducible and scalable fabrication of engineered tissues that can be implanted in the body to restore function after debilitating disease or injury.”<br>The study’s MIT co-authors include Sina Kheiri, Jessica Shah, Shashaank Venkatesh, and Roger Kamm, along with Peiyuan Chai and Ryan Flynn at Harvard University.<br>“Moving is good”<br>Blood vessels are tricky to grow and control using conventional fabrication techniques. While 3D printers can produce vessels at the scale of major arteries and veins, the technology is not precise...