MSCs: science and trials (original) (raw)

Nature Medicine volume 19, page 811 (2013)Cite this article

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To the Editor:

The recent Perspective by Bianco et al.1 raised many important issues. However, the authors did not make it clear that mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) from mice can be substantially different from MSCs from other organisms, ranging from rat to man, and they made no distinction of which results are from studies using human MSCs and which are from other species. Our work, in which we focused on human MSCs, used bone marrow as a source because it was thought to be a reservoir of, and renewable source for, these cells and did not require harvesting tissue 'in use'2. The study of human MSCs was pioneered by Caplan and co-workers3, and the research that preceded their efforts was in many different species, but not humans—this is nontrivial today, and it was nontrivial 20 years ago. Notably, akin to the admonitions of Bianco et al.1 and the data presented in Box 1 of their Perspective, the MSCs isolated by Caplan and co-workers had an in vivo assay as their origin3. However, at almost the same time as the cells became a band on a density gradient, hematologists recognized that this might be what was needed for patients with cancer to aid in the engraftment of transplanted hematopoietic progenitor cells4. Human stromal cells had been isolated a decade earlier for in vitro support of hematopoietic cells, but they were never of sufficient quality for clinical use, they had not been tested for multipotency and they were not pursued further5. In addition, given the requirement for selecting lots of fetal bovine serum by an in vivo assay, it is unlikely the early human stromal cells were indeed MSCs.

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References

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  1. Department of Surgery, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
    Mark F Pittenger

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Correspondence toMark F Pittenger.

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Pittenger, M. MSCs: science and trials.Nat Med 19, 811 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3219

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