These harvested MSCs are then screened to International Blood Bank Standards (Stem Cell Institute, 2012). Umbilical cord tissue provides
an abundant Rucaparib price supply of mesenchymal stem cells avoiding the requirement to harvest stem cells by invasive procedures such as liposuction or bone marrow aspiration. There is evidence showing that mesenchymal stem cells from umbilical cords are more robust than those from other sources such as fat[43]. Rush University Medical Center[44], 2013, described the preparation of MSCs harvested from donated umbilical cord tissue: The cells are mixed with hyaluronan, a natural polymer that plays an important role in wound healing and deposition of cartilage, and are subsequently re-injected into the knee joint. In addition they also described a two-year Phase I/IIa clinical study in which a total of 12 participants aged 18 years and older, with a body mass index of less than 35 were enrolled. Initially,
six individuals with lesions sized 2 to 5 cm were recruited into the study and an additional six volunteers with lesions larger than 5 cm were enrolled subsequently. Each participant went through an eligibility screening followed by a 12-mo observation period to determine the safety and efficacy of the therapy with an additional long-term follow-up evaluation at 24 mo. Basically both treatment protocols, both for the MSCs from the patient and from a donor, were identical. Any differences in the MSCs and in some characteristics of the cells arose due to those from the patient themselves, from fat or bone marrow, being “older” than MSCs from umbilical cord and may therefore lack potential for proliferation and/or differentiation. CONCLUSION In recent years the role of stem cells in health and disease
is a topic of high interest for biomedical research, especially regenerative medicine[33,45,46], including non-pharmacologic treatment of knee OA[25,40,47], and drug discovery[48-50]. At the moment there is an increase in the number of clinical cases utilizing stem cell therapy for knee OA, however, many clinical protocols are still under development[26,30,40]. Future perspectives about clinical trials with stem cells from patients Based on the current status of clinical investigations regarding autologous stem cell therapy for OA of the knee some Brefeldin_A authors have expressed concerns about the issues of dosing , timing of intervention, type of MSCs, mode and route of delivery of MSCs in clinical studies[51-56]. Therefore the need for a gold standard for autologous stem cell therapy for knee OA arises, which (hopefully) will be the aim of future clinical trials. Another interesting trend is the increased research interest in scaffold assisted or scaffoldless grafts of MSCs as a method to restore the structural and biomechanical characteristics of the OA affected knee[57-62]. MSC grafts may even prove to be a viable alternative to total knee replacement in the near future.