A hot new topic in medical treatment is the use of stem cell in
therapy. Among this mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) attract a lot
attention, due to their ability to differentiate into multiple tissues, potential to down regulate and inhibit immune response in both recognition and elimination phases. They enhance engraftment of donor heamatopoietic cells after co-transplantation. MSC have been used to regenerate the marrow microenvironment after myeloablative therapy. Possible clinical applications proposed for MSC include stem cell transplantation, stem cell strategies for the repair of damaged organs and gene therapy.
The low frequency of MSC in bone marrow necessitate their invitro expansion prior to clinical use. We evaluated the effect of long culture on the senescence of these cells before their clinical use. After long term culture and different number of passages we believe that MSC enter senescence. Simultaneously these cells are losing their stem cell characteristics. Therefore it is much better to consider them for cell and gene therapy early on. After this experiment we started our first step of clinical trial by using the culture expanded autologous MSC transplant In patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and heart diseases. The results briefly are:
-Thirteen patients with heart diseases were transplanted (scar size has diminished, LVEF has increased with improvement of cardiac function as compared to control group).
-Ten MS patients with secondary progressive MS has also been transplanted (one patient improved 2.5 score in EDSS, four others showed some degree of improvement and five remaining unchanged). Finally after this preliminary studies we can conclude that transplant of MSC in safe and feasible procedure.