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In 1999, biomedical engineering Ph.D. student Shannon Dahl works in the lab of Duke anesthesiologist and biomedical engineer Laura Niklason in the Pratt School of Engineering. The team creates a novel “bioreactor” system and uses it to grow blood vessels that look and act like the real thing. A significant advance in the field of tissue engineering, the discovery ultimately leads to the first U.S. implantation of a bioengineered blood vessel, performed at Duke University Medical Center in 2013.
Dahl and Niklason went on to co-found biotech company Huymacyte in North Carolina which brought the blood vessel to market after extensive clinical trials and approved by the FDA in December 2024.