What’s New in Pubmed this week: Stem Cells

I’m subscribed to some search feeds at Pubmed. Here’s what caught my eye this week in the Stem Cells feed:


There were 29 new articles this week, three of which were open access.
Schäfer R, Wiskirchen J, Guo K, Neumann B, Kehlbach R, Pintaske J, Voth V, Walker T, Scheule AM, Greiner TO, Hermanutz-Klein U, Claussen CD, Northoff H, Ziemer G, Wendel HP. Aptamer-based isolation and subsequent imaging of mesenchymal stem cells in ischemic myocard by magnetic resonance imaging.
Rofo. 2007 Oct;179(10):1009-15. PMID: 17879173 Related Articles.

Boy, this sounds really interesting, but unfortunately I can’t read it. If anyone has any insight into which aptamers they’re using to select MSCs, please leave me a note.


Ball LM, Bernardo ME, Roelofs H, Lankester A, Cometa A, Egeler RM, Locatelli F, Fibbe WE.
Cotransplantation of ex vivo expanded mesenchymal stem cells accelerates lymphocyte recovery and may reduce the risk of graft failure in haploidentical hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation. Blood. 2007 Oct 1;110(7):2764-7. Epub 2007 Jul 16. PMID: 17638847 Related Articles.

I’m kinda wondering now why this hasn’t been tried before, given all that’s been done regarding MSC immunosuppression and their known endogenous role as hematopoiesis supporting cells. What the researchers did was to administer MSCs(~1×106/kg) to patients receiving HLA-mismatched HSCs as part of their treatment for a hematological malignancy. They compared the clinical parameters and outcomes of MSC-infused patients with previous patients who had only received HSCs. Interestingly, they found that not only did the blood system come back a day or two faster in the MSC group, but 0/14 patients experienced graft failure, compared with their historical average of ~15%. However, there was a slightly higher incidence of viral reactivation(50% vs. 35%). Whatever the MSCs are doing, they must be doing it pretty quickly, because there were no MSCs to be found in patients, even those who ended up with 100% donor-derived HSCs.

Sze SK, de Kleijn DP, Lai RC, Khia Way Tan E, Zhao H, Yeo KS, Low TY, Lian Q, Lee CN, Mitchell W, El Oakley RM, Lim SK. Elucidating the secretion proteome of human embryonic stem cell-derived mesenchymal stem cells. Mol Cell Proteomics. 2007 Oct;6(10):1680-9. Epub 2007 Jun 11. PMID: 17565974 Related Articles.

In yet more “news I can’t use”, this Singaporean group claims to have done an amazing study. They’ve developed a chemically defined, serum free culture medium for MSCs, and proceeded to profile the MSC proteome. Unfortunately, they also claim to have made their MSCs by differentiating ESCs. Since I can’t get to the paper to see by what criteria they’re calling these cells MSCs, I can’t comment on the science itself, but I sure wish someone would do this on real MSCs. It would also be nice to know what chemically defined medium they’re using.

Well, that’s all that caught my eye this week. As you can probably tell by now, tissue engineering doesn’t really get me that excited, and when I say “Stem Cells”, I really mean Adult Stem/Progenitor Cells. When ESCs start having a few more applications, I may start including them. I figured that I should make my biases known.

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