Digging For Stem Cells
As ScienceDaily reports, scientists are making real progress in identifying useful stem cells in adult tissue. The regenerative medicine of 2017 will be a far cry from the early work taking place today: "Adipose tissue [requires] rapid adjustment in its blood supply and supporting connective tissue, or stroma. Based on previous reports that the 'stromal vascular' fraction of adipose tissue contains stem cells that give rise to pericytes - cells surrounding small blood vessels - [researchers] isolated the stromal vascular fraction from human adipose tissue ... Using a cell-sorting method known as flow cytometry, the researchers detected a broad spectrum of blood-forming, or hematopoietic, cells among the cultured cells at varying stages of differentiation ... Moreover, they detected CD34+ cells at approximately the same frequency as is present in freshly isolated bone marrow. In bone marrow, CD34+ expression indicates the presence of progenitor cells which give rise to all of the different types of blood cells. ... Since it has been shown in some cases that tumor cells contaminating bone marrow grafts are the source of recurrent malignancies after autologous transplantation, this might be a way of giving patients who need bone marrow reconstitution their own hematopoietic cells derived from a source other than their defective bone marrow."
Link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070614164011.htm