Research on Using Umbilical Cord Blood to Repair Heart Tissue

Research on Using Umbilical Cord Blood to Repair Heart Tissue

According to an article on the Israel21C website, researchers in Israel are developing ways to use umbilical cord blood as a source for stem cells that could be injected into an injured heart. Jonathon Leor, of the Neufeld Cardiac Research Institute, affiliated with Tel Aviv University, said that one of the biggest challenges with stem cell therapy has been to make enough cells. He cited the potential for embryonic stem cells to differentiate into tumors and the scarcity of adult stem cells in the patient as the main difficulties. Umbilical cord blood (UCB), on the other hand, is easily available.

Leor’s research shows that the risk of rejection of UCB cells is reduced. The cells can regenerate quickly and have the potential to help with the healing of damaged hearts in several ways: creating new heart cells, creating new blood vessel cells, and releasing molecules or hormones that aid in healing.

He performed a study by injecting UCB cells into pigs who had had heart attacks. The cells were injected via catheter and survived in the infracted myocardium. He plans to do pre-clinical trials on pigs later this year.

New Silicon Technology Used in Stem Cell Research

New Silicon Technology Used in Stem Cell Research

Researchers at Stanford University have designed an experiment to grow stem cells on a silicon chip. This is a solution to the problem of how to direct specific chemicals at particular stem cells; right now, all the stem cells have to be doused for the right ones to be affected. The silicon chip that Nicholas Melosh and his colleagues are designing has a place for one stem cell and up to 1000 cavities that are 500 nanometers wide. The reservoirs each contain a sealed liquid, making them comparable to stem cells’ neighboring cells. Scientist can use electricity to open up a particular reservoir, thus exposing the stem cell to only one particular kind of chemical, and in an amount comparable to what stem cells would receive in the human body. The team is working right now with fat-derived stem cells.

A possible future use of this technology would be to grow tissue layer by layer, so that compound tissues, such as those that are cartilage on one side and bone on the other, could be grown.

The chip is still being fine-tuned; researchers hope to replace the current lipid seal over the reservoirs with a non-reactive gold one, and they need to ensure that the voltage opening the reservoirs does not affect the stem cells. But Melosh predicts being able to use this technology in research far sooner than his estimated five to eight years for standard electronics marketing.

This article from which this information is taken appeared on the online site for Scientific American, September 19, 2005.