Stem cells found to heal damaged artery in lab study
Scientists
at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio have for the first
time demonstrated that baboon embryonic stem cells can be programmed to
completely restore a severely damaged artery. These early results show promise
for eventually developing stem cell therapies to restore human tissues or
organs damaged by age or disease. "We first cultured the stem cells in
petri dishes under special conditions to make them differentiate into cells
that are the precursors of blood vessels, and we saw that we could get them to
form tubular and branching structures, similar to blood vessels," said
John L. VandeBerg, Ph.D., Texas Biomed's chief scientific officer.
This
finding gave VandeBerg and his team the confidence to do complex experiments to
find out if these cells could actually heal a damaged artery. Human embryonic
stem cells were first isolated and grown in 1998.
The results are presented in a manuscript, co-authored by Texas
Biomed's Qiang Shi, Ph.D., and Gerald Shatten, Ph.D., of the University of
Pittsburgh, published in the January 10, 2013 issue of the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.
The
scientists found that cells derived from embryonic stem cells could actually
repair experimentally damaged baboon arteries and "are promising therapeutic
agents for repairing damaged vasculature of people," according to the
authors.
Researchers
completely removed the cells that line the inside surface from a segment of
artery, and then put cells that had been derived from embryonic stem cells inside
the artery. They then connected both ends of the arterial segment to plastic
tubing inside a device called a bioreactor which is designed to grow cells and
tissues. The scientists then pumped fluid through the artery under pressure as
if blood were flowing through it.
The
outside of the artery was bathed in another fluid to sustain the cells located
there. Three days later, the complex structure of the inner surface was
beginning to regenerate, and by 14 days, the inside of the artery had been
perfectly restored to its complex natural state. It went from a non-functional
tube to a complex fully functional artery.
"Just
think of what this kind of treatment would mean to a patient who had just
suffered a heart attack as a consequence of a damaged coronary artery. And this
is the real potential of stem cell regenerative medicine -- that is, a
treatment with stem cells that regenerates a damaged or destroyed tissue or
organ," VandeBerg said.
To show
that the artery couldn't heal itself in the absence of stem cells, the
researchers took a control arterial segment that also was stripped of the cells
on its interior surface, but did not seed it with stem cells. No healing
occurred.
Stains
for proteins that indicate functional characteristics showed that the healed
artery had completely normal function and could do everything that a normal
artery does in a healthy individual.
"This
is evidence that we can harness stem cells to treat the gravest of arterial
injuries," said VandeBerg.
Eventually,
scientists hope to be able to take a skin cell or a white blood cell or a cell
from any other tissue in the body, and induce it to become just like an
embryonic stem cell in its capacity to differentiate into any tissue or organ.
"The
vision of the future is, for example, for a patient with a pancreas damaged
because of diabetes, doctors could take skin cells, induce them to become stem
cells, and then grow a new pancreas that is just like the one before disease
developed," VandeBerg said.
This
work was supported by NIH grants P01 HL028972 and P51 OD011133, the Voelcker
Foundation and Texas Biomed's Founder's Council. The baboons used for this
study were housed in facilities constructed with support from NIH Research
Facilities Improvement Grant C06 RR015456.
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Posted by Unknown
on Friday, January 11, 2013.
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