More than 430,000 Americans with heart disease require coronary artery bypass surgery each year, and up to 200,000 suffer from critical limb ischemia, or clogged arteries in the leg--one of the major causes of amputation. In the 1940s and 1950s, techniques were developed to surgically transplant blood vessels by grafting sections of arteries or veins to replace diseased or damaged portions of other vessels. These transplants were frequently unsuccessful--donor arteries often were rejected by the recipient or quickly developed arteriosclerosis, while transplanting vessels from the patient's own body required two surgeries and many patients had no suitable vessels for transplantation.

To overcome these problems, researchers began to experiment with synthetic blood vessel materials. During World War I, French-born surgeon Alexis Carrel had tried using tubes of glass and aluminum, and later attempts were made with polyethylene and siliconized rubber. Results from all these experiments indicated that...