Can A Patient’s Own Fat Stem Cells Be Used To Help Fight Brain Cancer?
A Cell Therapy First: Comparison Study of patient-harvested Adipose Mesenchymal Stem Cells and commercially obtained AMSCs and BMSCs (bone marrow)
This study from the Johns Hopkins Departments of Neurosurgery and Oncology (PLOS ONE; Vol 8-3; March 2013) is crucial to the future of cell therapy in many different ways:
1) it compares autologous to allogeneic
2) it compares bone marrow MSCs to adipose
3) it assesses their tropism towards Glioma, a very common brain tumor.
Major findings and conclusions can be summarized as follows:
- Adipose (autologous and allogeneic) and bone marrow-derived (allogeneic) mesenchymal stem cells appear to have similar glioma tumor tropism in vitro. The actual treatment of gliomas requires a population of cells with a doubling time and proliferation rate rapid enough to allow timely expansion of autologous cells for clinical applications.
- Pluripotentiality for both AMSC and BMSC lines was confirmed through differentiation along three mesenchymal lineages: adipocytes, osteocytes, and chondrocytes. Commercial animal media were used (rabbit, goat, bovine, etc.) whereby patented human based media are readily available from American Cryostem.
- While the volume of bone marrow that can be harvested under local anesthesia is about 2.4 104 MSC, the volume of adipose that can be harvested this way is a minimum of 106 MSC. This forty-fold difference in harvest volume makes adipose tissue the more efficient cell source. A higher seeding density is necessary for the successful growth and expansion of BMSCs, which demonstrate slower growth characteristics.
- AMSCs have a faster proliferation rate that is retained through multiple passages. This rate is important not only in maximizing clinical applications, but also in minimizing the risk of malignant transformation, which has been linked to the length of ex vivo culture
- Unmodified human AMSCs remain free of oncogenic trans-formation for at least eight months, when injected into immune-compromised mice, demonstrating more oncogenic resistance than BMSCs
- The BMSC population has been shown to decrease substantially with age and diabetes casting further doubt on the use of autologous BMSCs as a therapeutic delivery vehicle in the patient population most often afflicted with gliomas. Dormant TB bacteria and high viral counts have also been encountered in bone marrow.
- The study showed inter-patient stemness variability in the primary AMSC lines which would most likely be worse for autologous BMSC lines as described above. Hence the importance of storing one’s adipose cells while young and healthy to get the best stemness. American Cryostem features an FDA-regulated laboratory, which is the world leader in adipose cryopreservation
You can view the full research article here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0058198