UCLA scientists and collaborators have developed a first-of-its-kind roadmap that chronicles each step of blood stem cell development in the human embryo, giving scientists with a blueprint for creating fully functional blood stem cells in the lab.
The discovery, conducted by Dr. Hanna Mikkola of UCLA’s Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research, could help broaden therapy choices for blood malignancies like leukaemia and inherited blood abnormalities like sickle cell disease, according to the study’s lead author.
Hematopoietic stem cells, commonly known as blood stem cells, have the ability to divide indefinitely and develop into any type of blood cell in the human body.
Blood stem cells from donors’ bone marrow and babies’ umbilical cords have been utilized in life-saving transplant therapies for blood and immunological illnesses for decades. However, because to a scarcity of matched donors and the low number of stem cells in cord blood, these treatments are limited.
Researchers have attempted to overcome these constraints by creating blood stem cells in the lab using human pluripotent stem cells, which have the ability to give rise to every cell type in the body.
However, success has eluded scientists, in part due to a lack of instructions for converting lab-grown cells into self-renewing blood stem cells rather than short-lived blood progenitor cells that can only create a limited number of blood cell types.
“No one has succeeded in producing functional blood stem cells from human pluripotent stem cells because we didn’t know enough about the cell we were trying to make,” said Mikkola, a UCLA College professor and member of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
According to UCLA scientist Vincenzo Calvanese, who co-authored the study with UCLA’s Sandra Capellera-Garcia and Feiyang Ma, “the new roadmap will help researchers understand the fundamental differences between the two cell types, which is critical for creating cells that are suitable for use in transplantation therapies.”
Calvanese, who is also a group leader at University College London, said, “We now have a manual of how hematopoietic stem cells are produced in the embryo and how they acquire the particular features that make them beneficial for patients.” The public can view the de-identified data on the website The Atlas of Human Hematopoietic Stem Cell Development.
The resource was created using single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics, new technologies that allow scientists to identify the unique genetic networks and functions of thousands of individual cells while also revealing their location in the embryo.
The research team included scientists from Germany’s University of Tübingen and Australia’s Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.
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