Scientists identify stem cell growth factor

Scientists at Duke University Medical Center have identified a new growth factor that stimulates the expansion and regeneration of hematopoietic (blood-forming) stem cells in culture and in laboratory animals.

The discovery, appearing Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine, may help researchers overcome one of the most frustrating barriers to cellular therapy. The fact that stem cells are so few in number and so stubbornly resistant to expansion.

Researchers believe that umbilical cord blood could serve as a universal source of stem cells for all patients who need a stem cell transplant, but the numbers of stem cells in cord blood units are limited, so there is a clinical need to develop a method to expand cord blood stem cells for transplantation purposes.

“Unfortunately, there are no soluble growth factors identified to date that have been proven to expand human stem cells for therapeutic purposes,” said John Chute, a stem cell transplant physician and cell biologist at Duke and senior author of the paper.

Chute, working with Heather Himburg, a post-doctoral fellow in his laboratory, discovered that adding pleiotrophin, a naturally- occurring growth factor, stimulated a ten-fold expansion of stem cells taken from the bone marrow of a mouse.

They also found that pleiotrophin increased the numbers of human cord blood stem cells in culture that were capable of engraftment in immune-deficient mice.

Reuters