Abra-Cadaver! Lab-Made Blood Vessels Come to Life

A healthy heart needs healthy vessels to pump oxygen to the rest of the body. Cardiovascular diseases can damage these vessels, and current treatments — like grafting vessels from elsewhere in a person’s body or from synthetic sources — come with serious risks. But in March, a team of researchers announced in Science Translational Medicine that they had made blood vessels in the lab that, once transplanted into people, can turn into functionally living tissue.