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Autologous conduits are not available in up to 40 per cent of patients with arteriopathy who require coronary or lower limb revascularization, and access sites for renal dialysis may eventually become exhausted. Synthetic prostheses achieve a poor patency rate in small-calibre anastomoses. This review examines how vascular tissue engineering may be used to address these issues.

A Medline search was performed, using the keywords ‘vascular tissue engineering’, ‘small diameter vascular conduit’, ‘vascular cell biology’, ‘biomechanics’, ‘cell seeding’ and ‘graft endothelialization’. Key references were hand-searched for relevant papers.

In vitro and in vivo approaches are currently being used for guided cell repopulation of both biological and synthetic scaffolds. The major clinical problem has been …