Faculty Member Lorenz Studer

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center biologists have taken a step forward in the field of stem cell research. For the first time, they employed new laboratory techniques to generate purified mesenchymal precursor cells -- which may give rise to fat, cartilage, bone, and skeletal muscle cells -- from human embryonic stem cells (HESCs). They hope these cells could eventually be used for regenerative stem cell therapy.

The researchers took two lines of completely undifferentiated HESCs and cultured them in the presence of mouse cells. They treated the resulting mesenchymal cells with additional compounds to produce specialized tissue cells, which they confirmed as entirely human and completely differentiated.

"Our study showed that HESCs could provide an unlimited number of mesenchymal precursor cells, precluding the need to use invasive techniques to harvest adult cell tissues," said Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center developmental biologist Lorenz Studer, the paper's senior author. "Equally important, embryonic mesenchymal precursors differentiate into specialized tissues better than adult cells."

According to Tiziano Barberi, the paper's lead author, investigators are testing the therapeutic potential and assessing the safety of embryonic stem cell-derived muscle cells in animal models. Their work was published in the June 27 issue of PLoS Medicine. [PubMed Abstract and Full Text]

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