Intra vascular stent deployment is complicated by stent related thrombosis in a significant number of patients. The use of anticoagulant drugs reduced the rate of thrombosis but is associated with a high rate of complications. In our current work we have shown that endothelial cells can be harvested from a superficial limb vein of a sheep, transduced in vitro to produce increased amounts of t-PA, and seeded on a balloon expandable stent. Furthermore, we have shown that the seeded cells adhere to the stents and that a significant number of viable cells are retained on the stent after expansion and exposure to physiological flow for two hours. The use of seeded stents in vivo may obviate the need for long term anticoagulant therapy. In our on going project we deploy the stents, seeded with autologous, genetically modified endothelial cells in adult sheep. Two weeks after deployment we screen the artery in which the stent was deployed for the foreign gene sequence with the use of the PCR technique. Once the presence of the transduced genes will be detected the role of the therapeutic proteins secreted by the transduced cells will be assessed.
