Observations on the Use of Preserved Venous Homografts in Experimental Aortic Defects

THE FEASIBILITY of bridging experimental arterial defects with vascular grafts preserved by refrigeration in salt solution and in defibrinated plasma was demonstrated by Carrel.¹He found that the chances of successful function of the preserved graft, whether arterial or venous, were better when the donor and recipient animals were of the same species. Such grafts he named homografts. Gross and his collaborators²preserved segments of aorta in a mixture of 10% dog serum and 90% "balanced salt solution" and reported satisfactory results in 21 of 24 aortic homografts transplanted into dogs which survived from four days to more than 10 mo. after operation. They attributed a considerable measure of their success to the fact that when the duration of storage was three weeks or less more than 80% of the grafts were shown to have viable cells by tissue culture. Successful implantation of venous segments into arteries as