Blood stem cell research could change the medicine of the future by overcoming ethical issues, rejection issues and donor shortages
Two independent working groups, biomedical engineers and medical researchers, have made new discoveries on how differentiate blood stem cells that might one day eliminate the need for donors of such cells. The results represent a breakthrough in regenerative medicine that it uses pluripotent stem cells induced for the treatment of diseases, in which stem cells are genetically reprogrammed by cells of adult tissue rather than using human embryos.
The pluripotent stem cells are promising in the field of regenerative medicine: since they can propagate indefinitely, in addition to giving rise to any type of cell in the body (neurons, heart, pancreatic and liver cells), they represent the only source of cells that could be used to replace those lost due to damage or illness.
While induced pluripotent stem cells have been known since 2006, scientists still have a lot to learn about how cell differentiation in the human body can be artificially and safely imitated in the laboratory. Now two new works show how stem cell progenitors can be artificially produced.
In the first work published Tuesday in Cell Reports, researchers at the UNSW School of Biomedical Engineering in Sydney demonstrated how using a pulsating microfluid circulation device (a simulation of the blood circulation conditions produced by the beating heart) in the laboratory led to the development of progenitors of human blood stem cells. In another article recently published in Nature Cell Biology, other researchers from UNSW Medicine & Health revealed the icell dentity in mouse embryos responsible for formation of stem cells in the blood.
Both studies represent significant steps towards understanding how, when, where and which cells are involved in the formation of blood stem cells. In the future, questknowledge could be used to help cancer patients, among others, who have undergone high doses of radium and chemotherapy, to replenish depleted blood stem cells.
In these studies, the researchers mimicked the conditions of mechanical stress that cells in nature (in our body) basically receive from the pumping action of the heart. Manuela Monti, PhD in Bioengineering and Bioinformatics, Researcher at the University of Pavia. These cells are those that reside in the endothelium of the great vessels (for example the aorta), escape, and under the mechanical stress of the heart pump they become progenitors of hematopoiesis (set of processes that lead to the formation of blood cells) then differentiating into all cell types that make up the blood (white, red, platelets). Researchers they managed to recreatethanks to a device that is based on microfluidics, these mechanical stresses and thus obtain the progenitors of hematopoiesis
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In recent decades, biomedical engineers have sought to produce blood stem cells in laboratory plates to solve the problem of the shortage of blood stem cells from donors. But no one has yet managed to reach it.
Australian researchers are now cautiously optimistic about their success inemulation of embryonic heart conditions with a mechanical device. They hope it can be a step towards solving the challenges limiting regenerative medical treatments today: stem cell deficiency donor blood, rejection of donor tissue cells and the ethical issues surrounding the use of embryos generated with in vitro fertilization.
Since there is a great need for blood – concludes Dr. Monti – it is important to find a way to use it tissue engineering techniquesregenerative medicine to obtain new cells, bypassing, for example, the use of embryonic stem cells (which could be differentiated into almost all cell types if there were no veto dictated by ethical problems) or the famous iPS (pluripotent stem cells induced, those of Shinya Yamanaka’s 2012 Nobel Prize) thanks to their culture in “special” terrains that induce their differentiation.
September 14, 2022 (change September 14, 2022 | 19:04)
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