Dr. John Dick, Senior Scientist at the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine and the Ontario Cancer Institute, University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto , has just published a paper 1 describes the isolation and characterization of human blood stem cells. So far, the real identity of the strain of human blood cell has not been defined and all studies with human blood stem cells were performed using a mixture of cells containing blood stem cells. The feat of identifying the human blood stem cell has been compared to finding a needle in a haystack by Dr. Mick Bhatia, scientific director of the Stem Cell Research and the Institute of Cancer in McMaster University.
So what is the impact of this discovery? Well, in the world, an estimated two-thirds of patients in need of bone marrow transplants never find a correct match. Cord blood is used increasingly often as a source of hematopoietic stem cells for bone marrow transplantation. The use of umbilical cord blood, adult, however, is limited due to the limited number of blood stem cells that are usually present in a cord blood unit. The identification of the stem cell real blood will develop technologies to develop these cells specifically, which we hope will help treat more patients who need a transplant of blood stem cells.
1Science 2011 333 (6039) 218-213 Stem Cell Isolation simple human hematopoitic graft capable multilineage long term