Monday, October 31, 2011

Harvard Med School researchers help direct stem cells

By James M. Connolly

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and other hospitals have taken a step toward making stem cell therapies more effective by adding homing receptors to those cells.

Attaching the chemical receptors to stem cells has the potential to increase the concentration of cells at target locations in the body, according to the researchers, who published their findings in the journal Blood. The development was reported by Brigham and Women’s in a press release.

“The central hypothesis of our work is that the ability of cells to home to specific tissues can be enhanced, without otherwise altering cell function,” said corresponding author Jeffrey M. Karp, PhD, co-director of the Regenerative Therapeutics Center at BWH and a principal faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in the press release. “By knowing the ‘zip code’ of the blood vessels in specific tissues, we can program the ‘address’ onto the surface of the cells to potentially target them with high efficiencies.”

Karp noted that tracking cell therapies to the right location can minimize the need for repeated invasive procedures in parts of the body such as the heart.

The researchers created a platform on which cells are prepared to travel directly to the area of interest after being injected through a less invasive intravenous infusion method, said Debanjan Sarkar, formerly a postdoctoral fellow in Karp’s lab.

Study authors also include: Sebastian Schafer, Weian Zhao, Dawn P. Spelke, Joseph A. Philips, Praveen Kumar Vemula, and Rukmani Sridharan, each of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology; Joel A. Spencer, of Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Tufts University; Rohit Karnik, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Charles P.Lin, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.