About McFetridge

In the world of heart bypass surgery, medical practitioners turn to artificial materials or a patient’s own blood vessels to replace a diseased or dysfunctional vessel. Engineering professor Peter McFetridge is developing an alternative that could eliminate the possibility of rejection of artificial material and also provide a supply of adaptable biological material to those patients who don’t have usable replacement vessels of their own.

McFetridge’s patent-pending process uses umbilical cords to produce a uniform material for bypass and other grafting applications.

The umbilical cord has two small arteries and a vein, which McFetridge freezes to rigidity and lathes to produce a uniform material. The material is composed of collagen and elastin, proteins that don’t elicit a strong immune reaction when implanted. The proteins serve as a type of scaffold, much like rebar in building construction, on which cells from a patient can be seeded to grow tissue that is unlikely to be rejected by the body.

“This approach is to not to implant a fully remodeled, fully developed vessel, but one that is most of the way there – it is biologically functional enough so that it won’t fail. Over time the cells will remodel and function better,” McFetridge says. “The goal is to prepare the material in five to seven days, so it will benefit many patients.”