Dr F. Perry Wilson explains why — at the moment — we have reason to be skeptical about stem cell therapies marketed for commonplace aches and pains.
, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I'm Dr F. Perry Wilson of the Yale School of Medicine.
Patients typically come to a"regenerative medicine" clinic and, after a consultation, have what amounts to a small bit ofto harvest fat from the abdomen or, less commonly, a bone marrow aspirate. Both sources of tissue are thought to be rich in stem cells and are used interchangeably. The aspirated tissue is not processed — the FDA has not approved the use of cultured cells in these procedures — so basically the fat is sucked out of your belly and injected into your knee.
It turns out that there are some standard ways to define whether a given cell is a stem cell or not, based on markers that appear on the surface of the cell. The unique combination of the various markers tells us, in great detail, what kind of cell it is. One combination represents a T-helper cell; another is a fibrocyte. What we're looking for is mesenchymal stem cells, which have this particular surface marker combination.
Enter tissue transcriptomics. Here, the RNA from the cells harvested from fat or bone marrow is analyzed. Instead of asking what the surface markers of the cells are, we are asking a more fundamental question: What are these cells doing? What are they making? Another experiment enriched the slurry with cultured stem cells — the real deal, the gold standard — and no, you can't get them because cultured stem cells are not FDA-approved for injection for knee pain or anything else at this time. You can see there's a bunch of them, in blue, and that they are kind of close to the smattering of bone marrow stem cells but not overlapping.
Transplantation Of Hematopoietic Stem Cells Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant Stem Cell Transplantation Stem Cell Therapy Stem Cell Haematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant HSCT Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation (HSCT) Haematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation (HSCT) HSCT - Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation
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