Lab-grown blood vessels are cracking the disease that ages children too fast

Progeria is a cruel lottery ticket: a random gene change makes children age with shocking speed, and most die in their teens or early twenties from heart disease or stroke. Now Duke University engineers George Truskey and Kevin Shores have built working three-layer models of human blood vessels — inner lining, muscle, and an outer layer — to watch the disease unfold. Writing in Science Advances, they show each layer drives a different part of the damage: muscle cells thicken the walls, lining cells stir inflammation, and the long-overlooked outer cells amplify the whole attack. Then, with Harvard's David Liu, they used CRISPR — a tool that edits faulty genes — to correct the mutation in human cells, and the lab-grown vessels drifted back toward healthy. For a disease too rare for big clinical trials, it is a faster, cheaper way to hunt for treatments.