Stem Cells, Fat Tissue as Routes to Cell-Based Therapy

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Stem Cells, Fat Tissue as Routes to Cell-Based Therapy


Despite cost and regulatory hurdles, inroads from the bench, the desk, and even the greenhouse are advancing cell-based medicine

Neil Canavan
Canavan is a freelance writer based in New York

A recent front-page New York Times article focused on the promise of stem cell-based therapy for cardiovascular disease, but it did nothing to advocate the cell source in bone marrow. Marrow transplants are expensive, and harvesting the stem cells is an arduous procedure at best. But the article, and many others in the popular press, might well lead people to believe that the only option is embryonic stem cells (ESCs). They're cheaper, plentiful, and a lot easier to obtain, assuming you're not in the United States, that is. The problem is the controversy. Further, ESC therapy is still a very blue-sky proposition. Many scientists are convinced that adult stem cells are the way to go, but again, there's the problem of where to get them. Marc Beer, president and CEO of ViaCell Inc., Cambridge, Mass., suggests an alternative.

"Cell therapy is going to be enabled by using a noncontroversial source of stem cells that we can obtain in high volume that can demonstrate good plasticity, the ability of those cells to give rise to different
The CD90 is a marker commonly used to detect mesenchymal stem cells, which exist predominantly in bone marrow. This image shows that a population of regenerative cells isolated from within adipose tissue contains a subpopulation of cells that share similar properties with mesenchymal stem cells. (Source: MacroPore Biosurgery Inc.)
tissues." That source is umbilical cord blood. The past several years have seen critical breakthroughs in the understanding of cord blood dynamics, the most interesting of which is the documentation of pluripotency in cord-blood-derived stem cells, called unrestricted somatic stem cells (USSCs). This gave rise to several different lineages in vivo [G. Kogler et al., Journal of Experimental Medicine, vol. 200, pp. 123-135 (2004)], one of those being the cardiomyocyte.

As for how USSCs are used, Beer is not following the typical therapeutic method in which a particular progenitor cell, a hematopoietic cell for example, is isolated in culture. "We keep the USSC in an unrestricted state," Beer says. "Then we inject it and allow the cell to endogenously do what it should do."

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