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Liposuctioned fat stem cells to repair bodies

Expanding waistlines, unsightly bulges: people will gladly remove excess body fat to improve their looks. But unwanted fat also contains stem cells with the potential to repair defects and heal injuries in the body. A team led by Philippe Collas at the University of Oslo in Norway has identified certain chemical marks that allow him to predict which, among the hundreds of millions of stem cells in liposuctioned fat, are best at regenerating tissue.

Uncovering the nature and location of these molecular tags could allow scientists to pull off the ultimate trick of taking a patient’s own fat cells and using them for therapy, Collas told researchers gathered at the EuroSTELLS Workshop ‘Exploring Chromatin in Stem Cells?held on January 23-24, in Montpellier, France. "Fat tissue is an underappreciated source of stem cells," Collas pointed out. Unlike other sources of adult stem cells, such as bone marrow, fat is abundant and there is no shortage of donors. "It’s wonderful, we have litres and litres of material from cosmetic surgery clinics and end up with bucketfuls of stem cells to work with," he notes.

EuroSTELLS Project Leader Cesare Galli, from the University of Bologna, Italy has high hopes that transplanted fat stem cells will restore injured sports horses to their former glory. "Our aim is to regenerate the tendon structure that does not repair spontaneously," says Galli. Once scar tissue is formed, it hinders the animal’s recovery. "If you intervene, with cell transplants, within one week, you can repair the lesion," Galli notes. Like horses, humans are also vulnerable to joint injuries, and rehabilitations are long and costly. Now experience with horses is paving the way to cell therapies for sport-related tendon injuries in humans. Therapies using bone marrow stem cells, similar to fat stem cells, have achieved some successes, but the focus is shifting to fat, since the tissue is easier to access and extract than the bone marrow. That fat-b
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Source:European Science Foundation


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