SCIENTISTS at the University of Bristol have been awarded funding that will revolutionalise treatment for people with heart problems.

Professor Raimondo Ascione, Professor Sarah George and Dr Jason Johnson, have been granted £268,000 by the British Heart Foundation to investigate a tissue engineering technique that transforms veins into arteries, meaning people requiring heart bypasses will be less likely to need an additional operation in the future.

Heart bypass surgery is a procedure that helps improve blood flow by replacing blocked arteries.

The problem with the current surgery is that replacement arteries are limited, so surgeons use veins from a person’s leg to replace the blocked vessels in the heart.

These veins will begin to fail after five-10 years, meaning patients will face an additional operation.

Professor Raimondo Ascione, Chair of Cardiac Surgery and Translational Research, explained: “Currently, veins are used for approximately 80 per cent of all grafts made during heart bypass surgery.

"They work well in the short-term, but they begin to block and fail after 5 years as they’re not designed for the demands of working as an artery.”

“By stripping back a vein and using it as the framework on which to build an artery, we hope to create tissue-engineered arterial grafts that are better able to cope with the demands of carrying blood from the heart.”

If successful, the research could change the way heart bypass surgery is performed.

Patients would be admitted into hospital a few weeks before their operation, and veins would be taken and engineered into arteries which could then be put in place during a bypass surgery.

Dr Subreena Simrick, Research Advisor at the BHF, said: “Having already shown the exciting potential of this technique, Professor Ascione and the Bristol team will now seek to establish if it could improve outcomes in a model of heart bypass surgery.”

“This project is a crucial next step in trying to turn that potential into a treatment that could benefit patients in the future.”

“It is only by funding high quality science like this that we can make new discoveries and translate them into medical advances."