Research in the Vascular Biology Group focuses on creating micro-vascular (capillary) blood vessel networks needed to support the tissues created for the purpose of tissue regeneration or reconstruction. This may be either in engineering of tissues, or as part of a wound healing response.
The group’s work originally focused on the spontaneous formation of capillary networks that sprouted from large blood vessels, isolated in a tissue engineering chamber model. This chamber model has also grown cardiac muscle, fat, pancreatic islets and liver tissue.
More recently the group has focused on growing capillary networks in the laboratory to vascularize 3D tissue engineering constructs prior to implantation in the lab.
