Drug regimes that increase the production of stem cells may circumvent some present limitations to a stem cell therapy, a new study suggests.
Stem cells have been hailed of late as the cures of disease and the saviours of patients. Yet researchers still face many obstacles before these new therapeutic tools can be put to work. For instance, what is the best way to generate stem cells, and how do you get them into the patients who need them? A study in Cell Stem Cell now shows that we may be able to side-step both of these issues by spurring bone marrow to boost stem cell production.
Previous studies have shown that treatment with granulocyte colony stimulating factor followed by recently approved Genzyme Corporation drug Mozobil can increase blood stem cell production. Sara Rankin, of Imperial College London, and her colleagues now show in mice that a different regime — endothelial growth factor followed by Mozobil — induces bone marrow to pump out two other types of stem cell.
These findings have “huge” implications, Rankin told the Guardian.
“It’s an untapped process,” said Rankin “Suppose a person comes in to hospital having had a heart attack. You give them these drugs and stem cells are quickly released into the blood. We know they will naturally home in on areas of damage, so if you’ve got a broken bone, or you’ve had a heart attack, the stem cells will go there. In response to a heart attack, you’d accelerate the repair process.”
Rankin likens the body’s natural repair mechanism to a village with a single fire engine. When a fire breaks out, the engine makes its way there and starts to hose it down. “What we’re doing is sending signals to the fire station to release a hundred more fire engines, so the impact is much greater,” she said.”
Robert Lanza, chief scientist at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcestor, Massachusetts, agreed that the ability to spur stem cell production could be a “powerful tool.” However he warned the New Scientist that “we still don’t know if, or to what extent, this approach can actually orchestrate repairs in the body”.
Director of the Oxford Stem Cell Institute Paul Fairchild expressed similar sentiments to CNN:
This is of course just a proof of principle study in a mouse and of course we know that transition from mouse to man is never a simple one.
…
Mobilizing those stem cells is an enormously important first step, but it’s only a first step. It’s expecting an enormous amount for those stem cells to then find their way into a lesion, then to differentiate properly into the cell type that’s required, to become integrated functionally and to survive in an area which has very low oxygen tension because there’s little angiogenesis going on.
It’s a very important step forward and I don’t want to undermine that in the slightest, but it is just a first step of a long journey.
Top image: A stem cell emerging from bone marrow. Imperial College London.