Breuer Lab
The focus of the Christopher Breuer Lab is to design a tissue engineered vascular graft (TEVG) that can be used during surgery that, over time transitions to a normal blood vessel that will grow with our pediatric patients.
Our goal is to use these TEVGs in surgeries that repair our complex congenital heart patients. And because they transition to a normal blood vessel, they could potentially reduce the number of future surgeries these patients would have due to the graft material not growing.
The process of creating and implanting a TEVG involves placing the scaffold in a vacuum and seeding it with cells obtained from the patient’s bone marrow at the beginning of surgery and then placing the graft.
Over the next six months, the body acts as a bioreactor to grow a new vessel, and the scaffold disintegrates. When they started, they assumed that the cells that were seeded onto the scaffold made the resulting vessel, but surprisingly, they found the host cells were the ones that made the vessel.
View Dr. Breuer's recent paper in Science Translational Medicine:
Meet Our Team
Christopher Breuer, MD
Director
Christopher.Breuer@NationwideChildrens.org
Dr. Breuer is Co-Director of the new Tissue Engineering Program at Nationwide Children's Hospital and Director of Tissue Engineering in The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center's new Center for Regenerative Medicine and Cell Based Therapies. His clinical and research interests center on bioengineered tissue for use in surgery. Working with Dr. Toshiharu Shinoka, he was the first in the world to tissue engineer blood vessels and implant them in human infants. Dr. Breuer has many honors recognizing his contributions, including the Jacobsen Promising Investigator Award from the American College of Surgeons which is given to the most innovative young surgical investigator in the country.
Marissa Guo, MD
Postdoctoral Scientist
Marissa.Guo1@NationwideChildrens.org
James Reinhardt, PhD
Postdoctoral Scientist
James.Reinhardt@NationwideChildrens.org
James's research is focused on studying the role of platelets in neotissue formation and stenosis in tissue engineered vascular grafts. He is also trying to determine how bone marrow-derived mononuclear cells inhibit the formation of stenosis and whether this can be attributed to surface expressed nucleotidases.
Anudari Ulziibayar, MD
Postdoctoral Scientist
Anudari.Ulziibayar@NationwideChildrens.org
Dr. Ulziibayar earned her bachelor’s degree in Medicine and her master's degree in clinical Medicine in Shanghai, China. Her interests include pediatric cardiology, catheterization and catheter-based therapies. She joined the Breuer Lab to assist with research optimizing biodegradable Tissue Engineered Vascular Grafts (TEVGs) in animal models, with the eventual goal of translating the work to humans.
Tatsuya Watanabe, MD, PhD
Postdoctoral Scientist
Tatsuya.Watanabe@NationwideChilrens.org
Satoshi Yuhara
Postdoctoral Scientist
Satoshi.Yuhara@NationwideChildrens.org
Adrienne Morrison
Research Project Manager
Adrienne.Morrison@NationwideChildrens.org
Eric Heuer
Research Associate
Eric.Heuer@NationwideChildrens.org
Kirsten Nelson
Large Animal Surgical & Imaging Associate
Kirsten.Nelson@NationwideChildrens.org
Jingru Che
Research Assistant
Jingru.Che@NationwideChildrens.org
Joseph Leland
Research Assistant
Joseph.Leland@NationwideChildrens.org
Cole Anderson
Research Student
Cole.Anderson@NationwideChildrens.org
Mackenzie Turner
Research Student
Mackenzie.Turner@NationwideChildrens.org
Delaney Villarreal
Research Student
Delaney.Villarreal@NationwideChildrens.org