Seoul, Korea
Ischemia of the extremities, either of atherosclerotic or nonatherosclerotic origin is a major cause of amputations. In a study published today (*Kim SW et al. Successful stem cell therapy using umbilical cord blood-derived multipotent stem cells for Buerger's disease and ischemic limb disease animal model. Stem Cells. 2006 Jun;24(6):1620-6*), successful treatment of Buerger’s disease (nonatherosclerotic limb ischemia) was performed in 4 patients using HLA-mismatched cord blood derived mesenchymal stem cells.
The authors reported: “After the stem cell transplantation, ischemic rest pain suddenly disappeared from their affected extremities. The necrotic skin lesions were healed within 4 weeks. In the follow-up angiography, digital capillaries were increased in number and size”
To our knowledge, this is one of the first published demonstrations of using cord blood stem cells in a non-immunosuppressed setting. This is a very important proof-of-principle study since current dogma teaches that administration of cord blood cells in absence of immune suppression, would lead to Host versus Graft-mediated clearance.
The cord blood cells were actually differentiated into mesenchymal cells before use. Osiris Therapeutics has the US patent on mesenchymal stem cells (Caplan et al. #5,486,359 Human mesenchymal stem cells, Issued January 23, 1996). Although this patent does not mention cord blood as a source, it does claim an SH2, SH3, SH4 positive “mesenchymal cell”. Since the authors didn’t restrict themselves in the independent claims as to origin of the mesenchymal stem cells, theoretically, their patent should cover this work.
Therapeutic angiogenesis by bone marrow derived stem cells appears to be covered in US patent # 6,878,371, issued on April 12, 2005 to Ueno,et al. and assigned to Boston Scientific. This patent covers in its independent claims several relevant concepts, including:
"A method of forming new blood vessels in cardiac muscle tissue in a subject, wherein the subject is a human, which comprises: a) isolating autologous bone marrow-mononuclear cells from the human, wherein the autologous bone marrow-mononuclear cells are isolated from bone marrow; and b) transplanting locally into the cardiac muscle tissue an effective amount of the autologous bone-marrow mononuclear cells, resulting in formation of new blood vessels in the cardiac muscle tissue."
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