She's a Scientist: Courtney Keiser

Curt Bright Author

05/02/2022 Added

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A Mechanical & Materials engineering doctoral student develops nano-fiber graphs for artery replacement.

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[00:00:00.000](upbeat music)
[00:00:02.740]This is the femoral popliteal here.
[00:00:04.960]Doctoral candidate, Courtney Keiser
[00:00:07.100]dissects a peripheral artery,
[00:00:08.850]which carries blood through the leg.
[00:00:10.540]Once you've dissected it,
[00:00:11.690]you can kind of feel along the artery
[00:00:14.100]and you can feel any calcification
[00:00:15.990]it's very hard and stiff.
[00:00:17.970]The stiffness in the artery
[00:00:19.440]is caused by peripheral artery disease.
[00:00:22.060]It's a buildup of plaque, which narrows
[00:00:24.300]or blocks the flow of blood through the artery.
[00:00:26.990]So 8.5 million adult Americans
[00:00:28.990]have peripheral artery disease.
[00:00:31.270]The total annual cost for hospitalizations
[00:00:33.700]for PAD is in excess of 21 billion per year.
[00:00:37.140]And that's because the need for re-intervention
[00:00:39.680]because these devices fail is so high.
[00:00:42.350]Commercial bypass grafts
[00:00:43.780]allow blood to flow around the blockage.
[00:00:46.020]However, they often fail within a few years.
[00:00:49.110]So this is a commercial graft.
[00:00:51.240]This doesn't have any reinforcement to it and so it pitches.
[00:00:54.580]when it's bent.
[00:00:55.760]It's very stiff you can't pre-stretch it,
[00:00:58.330]or there's no like tension to it
[00:01:00.670]where our bypass grafts
[00:01:03.860]are able to be stretched longitudinally,
[00:01:06.650]which more mimics the native vasculature
[00:01:09.550]of the femoral popliteal artery.
[00:01:11.317](machine whirrs)
[00:01:13.350]Keiser makes artery grafts
[00:01:14.500]out of electrospun nanofibers
[00:01:16.640]which she creates in the lab.
[00:01:18.430]The nanofibers mimic the architecture of the real artery
[00:01:21.500]encouraging blood and cells to attach and grow.
[00:01:24.410]My bypass graft you can stretch it
[00:01:27.320]and then there's reinforcement incorporated within it
[00:01:31.500]to help prevent kinking.
[00:01:33.217]And so we can implant it with that inherit pre-stretch
[00:01:36.830]so that when you bend and jump and walk
[00:01:39.200]it can accommodate those deformations
[00:01:40.900]without causing any tortuous behavior
[00:01:44.570]that would cause flow disturbances
[00:01:46.130]where this one, we can't implant that
[00:01:49.317]with any pre-stretch to it.
[00:01:51.020]So when you bend, it's gonna start to kink around.
[00:01:54.040]Keiser hopes that one day her nanofiber grafts
[00:01:56.520]will mean fewer surgeries
[00:01:57.900]for patients with peripheral artery disease.
[00:02:00.697](upbeat music)

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She's a Scientist: Courtney Keiser

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