Vascular tissue engineering: building perfusable vasculature for implantation

•Tissue engineering approaches have generated blood vessels in clinical trials.•Challenges remain to build perfusable microvasculature for implantation.•Decellularization provides a novel strategy for prevascularization.•Generation of human ECs for vascularization can be achieved using iPSCs.

Tissue and organ replacement is required when there are no alternative therapies available. Although vascular tissue engineering was originally developed to meet the clinical demands of small-diameter vascular conduits as bypass grafts, it has evolved into a highly advanced field where perfusable vasculatures are generated for implantation. Herein, we review several cutting-edge techniques that have led to implantable human blood vessels in clinical trials, the novel approaches that build complex perfusable microvascular networks in functional tissues, the use of stem cells to generate endothelial cells for vascularization, as well as the challenges in bringing vascular tissue engineering technologies into the clinics.