Washington, June 28 : In the first ever surgery of its kind, human blood vessels grown in a laboratory from donor skin cells have been successfully implanted into patients.

This proves that functioning blood vessels that aren''t rejected by the immune system could be used to make durable shunts for kidney dialysis.

In addition, it could potentially improve the treatment for children with heart defects and adults needing coronary or other bypass graft surgeries.

"Our approach could allow hundreds of thousands of patients to be treated from one master cell line," said Todd N. McAllister, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cytograft Tissue Engineering Inc., of Novato, California.

The graft also has the potential to be used in lower limb bypass to route blood around diseased arteries, to repair congenital heart defects in pediatric patients and to fix damaged arteries in soldiers, with the danger of losing a limb.

The tissue-engineered blood vessels, produced from sheets of cultured skin cells rolled around temporary support structures, were used to create access shunts between arteries and veins in the arm for kidney dialysis in three patients.

These shunts, which connect an artery to a vein, provide access to the blood for dialysis. The engineered vessels were about a foot long with a diameter of 4.8 millimeters.

In follow-up examinations, up to eight months after implantation, none of the patients were found to have developed an immune reaction to the implants.

Furthermore, the vessels withstood the high pressure and frequent needle punctures required for dialysis. It is known that shunts created from patients'' own vessels or synthetic materials are prone to failure.

According to the study, besides addressing a costly and vexing problem in kidney dialysis, off-the-shelf blood vessels may be used instead of harvesting patients'' own vessels for bypass surgery.

The research has been presented in the American Heart Association''s Emerging Science Series webinar. (ANI)