Study On The Biology Of Human Umbilical Cord Mesenchymal Stem Cells And The Potentials On Graft-versus-host Disease

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are of great therapeutic potential due to their capacity of self-renewal and multilineage differentiation. Currently, bone marrow (BM) represents the major source of MSCs for cell therapy. However, aspiration of BM involves invasive procedure. Moreover, the frequency and multi-lineage differentiation potential of BM-MSCs decrease significantly with age. Therefore, the search for alternative sources of MSCs is of significant value. We isolated abundant MSCs from the full term umbilical cord (UC). The biological characteristics, the immunological function and the effect on graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) of the UC-MSCs were further determined. The aim of this study is to find the alternative source for BM-MSCs.In the first part, a method to isolate abundant MSC from UC was described. The biological characteristics of the UC-MSCs were further determined and compared with BM-MSCs. The results showed that MSCs were successfully isolated from all the 36 UC and 8 BM. Although the mean number of nucleated cells isolated of UC was significantly lower than that of BM (1×10~6 /cm vs. 5.5×10~7/ml) (p=0.0002), no significant differences of the yield of adherent cells were observed (8.6×105/cm vs. 8.4×10~5/ml) (p>0.05). UC-MSCs shared the most of the characteristic of BM-MSCs, including fibroblastic-like morphology, typical immunophenotype, cell cycle status,...