A team of American researchers have made a discovery that could improve how bone marrow transplants are performed in the future. The discovery could lead to both safer and more effective transplants.
Bone marrow transplants are used to treat a variety of conditions including blood disorders, cancer, and immune system diseases. Doctors will give the patient high-dose chemotherapy or radiotherapy to kill the mutated blood-forming stem cells causing the disease, before transplanting bone marrow. The newly transplanted bone marrow contains stem cells that will re-establish the body’s ability to produce healthy blood cells.
Although thousands of bone marrow transplants have been performed, researchers are still unsure exactly how they work. To learn more about the biological processes that occur after a bone marrow transplant, scientists tested the procedure on mice.
They found that the stem cells that are transplanted from the bone marrow do not act normally. The high dose chemotherapy and radiation causes the stem cells to behave in an “extreme” way.
The researchers believe that this finding will have important implications for the understanding and optimising of bone marrow transplants and some types gene therapy.
The research was conducted by Dr Rong Lu, Assistant Professor of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Southern California, and Dr Irving Weissman, Director of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.
The researchers also found that only a small minority of the transplanted cells actually create blood and immune cells, with the majority remaining dormant. They found that the small number of active cells was biased into producing certain types of immune cells.
These findings lead researcher to believe that a pre-conditioning regime applied prior to transplantation may be the cause of the abnormal stem cell behaviour.
Source: Stem cell study optimises bone marrow transplants
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