‘New stem cell source’ discovered
Stem cells taken from the fluid that fills the womb in pregnancy could be used to create new brain, bone and liver cells, a study suggests.US researchers successfully extracted the amniotic cells from samples, and then grew them in lab experiments.
Writing in Nature Biotechnology, they said it should be possible to harness the cells’ ability to grow into different tissue to treat disease.
However, UK experts had doubts about the feasibility of the technique.
They said gathering amniotic fluid from large numbers of women might be difficult.
Amniotic fluid contains a large number of cells, many of which come from the developing foetus.
The team from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Texas extracted these from fluid samples taken as part of unrelated diagnostic tests during pregnancy, then encouraged them to grow in the laboratory.
They found that they had the potential to turn into a wide variety of different cells - the hallmark of potentially useful stem cells.
They then transplanted them into mice, and carried out further tests to look at how they performed in a living creature.
Again, the results were encouraging, with the stem cells spreading and starting to produce key body chemicals in both brain and liver.
Bone stem cells introduced onto an artificial ’scaffold’ then implanted into mice also appeared to behave in a similar way to normal bone cells, forming bone even months later.
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