Stem cells, come and fix this
Normally, when someone has a certain disease or suffers an injury, the bone marrow produces adult stem cells in order to repair the damage. However, that’s not enough sometimes and a wish of all scientists in this field was to be able to “push” the bone marrow to produce more stem cells and to “control” where the stem cells go. British researchers have finally found a way how to achieve that.
Scientists from the Imperial College London reported that they have found a method which allows them to boost the body’s ability to repair itself and speed up repair. That’s done by using different new drug combinations to put the bone marrow into a state of “alert” and send specific kinds of stem cells into action.
The research was done on mice and it was very successful. Scientists made the bone marrow of healthy mice to release two types of adult stem cells – mesenchymal stem cells, which can turn into bone and cartilage and that can also suppress the immune system, and endothelial progenitor cells, which can make blood vessels and therefore have the potential to repair damage in the heart.
The research actually showed that it is possible to control what types of stem cells are released from the bone marrow, and it’s all done by using different drug therapies. Ultimately, the researchers hope that their new method could be used to repair and regenerate tissue, for example when a person has heart disease or a sports injury, by mobilising the necessary stem cells.
“The body repairs itself all the time. We know that the skin heals over when we cut ourselves and, similarly, inside the body there are stem cells patrolling around and carrying out repair where it’s needed. However, when the damage is severe, there are limits to what the body can do of its own accord. We hope that by releasing extra stem cells, as we were able to do in mice in our new study, we could potentially call up extra numbers of whichever stem cells the body needs, in order to boost its ability to mend itself and accelerate the repair process. Further down the line, our work could lead to new treatments to fight various diseases and injuries which work by mobilising a person’s own stem cells from within,” said Dr Sara Rankin, one of the researchers.
The research team now wants to investigate whether releasing repair stem cells into the blood really does accelerate the rate and degree of tissue regeneration in mice that have had a heart attack. Depending on the outcome of this work, they hope that the clinical trials on humans could begin in the next ten years.
The research was funded by the British Heart Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, INNOCHEM and CNPq.
Source: imperial.ac.uk
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