Breakthrough Regenerative Cardiopoietic Stem Cells and Related Technologies in the Field of Cardiovascular Medicine – From Bench to Bedside

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Christian Homsy ◽  

The scale of cardiac diseases, and in particular heart failure and acute myocardial infarction, emphasises the need for radically new approaches, such as cell therapy, to address the underlying cause of the disease, the loss of functional myocardium. Stem cell-based therapies, whether through transplanted cells or directing innate repair, may provide regenerative approaches to cardiac diseases by halting, or even reversing, the events responsible for progression of organ failure. Cardio3 BioSciences, a leading Belgian biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of regenerative and protective therapies for the treatment of cardiac disease, was founded in this context in 2004. The company is developing a highly innovative cell therapy approach based on a platform designed to reprogramme the patient’s own stem cells into cardiac progenitor cells. The underlying rationale behind this approach is that, in order to reconstruct cardiac tissue, stem cells need to be specific to cardiac tissue. The key is therefore to provide cardiac-specific progenitor cells to the failing heart to induce cardiac repair.

2013 ◽  
Vol 125 (7) ◽  
pp. 319-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Eric Wang ◽  
Xiongwen Chen ◽  
Steven R. Houser ◽  
Chunyu Zeng

Stem cell therapy has emerged as a promising strategy for cardiac and vascular repair. The ultimate goal is to rebuild functional myocardium by transplanting exogenous stem cells or by activating native stem cells to induce endogenous repair. CS/PCs (cardiac stem/progenitor cells) are one type of adult stem cell with the potential to differentiate into cardiac lineages (cardiomyocytes, smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells). iPSCs (induced pluripotent stem cells) also have the capacity to differentiate into necessary cells to rebuild injured cardiac tissue. Both types of stem cells have brought promise for cardiac repair. The present review summarizes recent advances in cardiac cell therapy based on these two cell sources and discusses the advantages and limitations of each candidate. We conclude that, although both types of stem cells can be considered for autologous transplantation with promising outcomes in animal models, CS/PCs have advanced more in their clinical application because iPSCs and their derivatives possess inherent obstacles for clinical use. Further studies are needed to move cell therapy forward for the treatment of heart disease.


Author(s):  
Steven J. Joggerst ◽  
Antonis K. Hatzopoulos

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide. Acute ischaemic injury and chronic cardiomyopathies lead to permanent loss of cardiac tissue and ultimately heart failure. Current therapies aim largely to attenuate the pathological remodelling that occurs after injury and to reduce risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Studies in animal models indicate that transplantation of mesenchymal stem cells, bone-marrow-derived haematopoietic stem cells, skeletal myoblasts, or embryonic stem cells has the potential to improve the function of ventricular muscle after ischaemic injury. Clinical trials using primarily bone-marrow-derived cells and skeletal myoblasts have also produced some encouraging results. However, the current experimental evidence suggests that the benefits of cell therapy are modest, the generation of new cardiac tissue is low, and the predominant mechanisms of action of transplanted stem cells involve favourable paracrine effects on injured myocardium. Recent studies show that the adult heart possesses various pools of putative resident stem cells, raising the hope that these cells can be isolated for therapy or manipulated in vivo to improve the healing of cardiac muscle after injury. This article reviews the properties and potential of the various stem cell populations for cardiac repair and regeneration as well as the barriers that might lie ahead.


2015 ◽  
Vol 66 (16) ◽  
pp. C10
Author(s):  
Xiaohong Li ◽  
Lin Jiang ◽  
Yongheng Fu ◽  
Mengzhen Zhang ◽  
Honghong Tan ◽  
...  

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 637-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro W. Amici ◽  
Fatai O. Onikoyi ◽  
Paola Bonfanti

Recent evidence supports and reinforces the concept that environmental cues may reprogramme somatic cells and change their natural fate. In the present review, we concentrate on environmental reprogramming and fate potency of different epithelial cells. These include stratified epithelia, such as the epidermis, hair follicle, cornea and oesophagus, as well as the thymic epithelium, which stands alone among simple and stratified epithelia, and has been shown recently to contain stem cells. In addition, we briefly discuss the pancreas as an example of plasticity of intrinsic progenitors and even differentiated cells. Of relevance, examples of plasticity and fate change characterize pathologies such as oesophageal metaplasia, whose possible cell origin is still debated, but has important implications as a pre-neoplastic event. Although much work remains to be done in order to unravel the full potential and plasticity of epithelial cells, exploitation of this phenomenon has already entered the clinical arena, and might provide new avenues for future cell therapy of these tissues.


2016 ◽  
Vol 119 (suppl_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyun-Jai Cho ◽  
Choon-Soo Lee ◽  
Jin-Woo Lee ◽  
Jung-Kyu Han ◽  
Han-Mo Yang ◽  
...  

Backgrounds: The identification of a lineage-specific marker plays a pivotal role in understanding developmental process and is utilized to isolate a certain cell type with high purity for the therapeutic purpose. We here report a new cardiac-specific marker, and demonstrate its functional significance in the cardiac development. Methods and Results: When mouse pluripotent stem cells (ES and iPS cells) were stimulated with BMP4, Activin A, bFGF and VEGF, they differentiated into cardiac cells. To screen cell-surface expressing molecules on cardiac progenitor cells compared to undifferentiated mouse iPS and ES cells, we isolated Flk1+/PDGFRa+ cells at differentiation day 4 and performed microarray analysis. Among candidates, we identified a new G protein-coupled receptor, Latrophilin-2 (LPHN2) whose signaling pathway and its effect on cardiac differentiation is unknown. In sorting experiments under cardiac differentiation condition, LPHN2+ cells derived from pluripotent stem cells strongly expressed cardiac-related genes (Mesp1, Nkx2.5, aMHC and cTnT) and exclusively gave rise to beating cardiomyocytes, as compared with LPHN2- cells. LPHN2-/- mice revealed embryonically lethal and huge defects in cardiac development. Interestingly, LPHN2+/- heterozygotes were alive and fertile. For the purpose of cardiac regeneration, we transplanted iPS-derived LPHN2+ cells into the infarcted heart of adult mice. LPHN2+ cells differentiated into cardiomyocytes, and systolic function of left ventricle was improved and infarct size was reduced. We confirmed LPHN2 expression on human iPS and ES cell-derived cardiac progenitor cells and human heart. Conclusions: We demonstrate that LPHN2 is a functionally significant and cell-surface expressing marker for both mouse and human cardiac progenitor and cardiomyocytes. Our findings provide a valuable tool for isolating cardiac lineage cells from pluripotent stem cells and an insight into cardiac development and regeneration.


Circulation ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 130 (suppl_2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Yaniz-Galende ◽  
Luigi Formicola ◽  
Nathalie Mougenot ◽  
Lise Legrand ◽  
Jiqiu Chen ◽  
...  

The myocardium responds to injury by recruiting cardiac progenitor cells (CPCs) to the injured tissue to promote cardiac repair. Although different classes of CPCs have been identified, their contribution in physiological and pathological conditions remains unclear. PW1 gene has recently been proposed as a marker of resident adult stem and progenitor cell populations in several adult tissues. Our goal was to characterize and determine the role of PW1+ population in the heart. Here, we employ immunostaining and fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) analysis in PW1-reporter mouse to perform qualitative and quantitative analyses of PW1+ population in the heart. We first found that PW1+ cells are mainly located in the epicardium and myocardial interstitium of normal hearts. The average percentage of PW1+ cells, as assessed by FACS, was 1.56±1.41%. A subset of PW1+ cells also co-express other CPC markers such as Sca-1 (52±22%) or PDGFR1α (43±14%). In contrast, a very small proportion of PW1+ cells co-express c-kit (6±5%). To investigate the contribution of PW1+ cells in pathological conditions, we then performed myocardial infarction (MI) by LAD ligation in PW1-reporter mice. We found that MI resulted in a 3-fold increase in the number of PW1+ cells in infarcted mice compared with sham-operated groups, at 1 week post-MI (1.16%±0.47% in sham versus 3.43%±0.82 in MI). This population preferentially localized in the injured myocardium and border area. PW1+ cells were isolated by FACS from the whole infarcted heart from PW1-reporter mice. In vitro differentiation assays reveal that purified PW1+ cells are multipotent and can spontaneously differentiate into smooth muscle cells, endothelial cells and cardiomyocyte-like cells. Taken together, our data identify a novel PW1+ cardiac progenitor population with the potential to undergo differentiation into multiple cardiac lineages, suggesting their involvement in cardiac repair in normal and pathological conditions. The discovery of a novel population of cardiac progenitor cells, augmented following MI and with cardiogenic potential, provides a novel target for therapeutic approaches aimed at improving cardiac regeneration.


Nanoscale ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (43) ◽  
pp. 20766-20776 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lopamudra Das Ghosh ◽  
Jafar Hasan ◽  
Aditi Jain ◽  
Nagalingam R. Sundaresan ◽  
Kaushik Chatterjee

The array highly efficiently promotes cardiomyogenic commitment of stem cells via integrin-mediated signalling compared to the smooth surface and is a potential platform for ex vivo differentiation of stem cells for cell therapy in cardiac tissue repair and regeneration.


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