VARGHESE LAB, UC SAN DIEGOPeople with diseases of the blood often need bone marrow transplants to replace their blood-forming stem cells with those from healthy donors. But before those transplants, patients must eliminate their own bone marrow lest it compete with the introduced cells, and that process, which involves high doses of radiation and often drug treatments, too, has notoriously awful side effects, including nausea and fatigue.
Shyni Varghese of University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues have devised a way to skip this step: they have created a synthetic bone that can be filled with donor stem cells and transplanted without eliminating the recipient’s own cells first. As they reported in PNAS yesterday (May 8), the procedure works in mice.
“We’ve made an accessory bone that can separately accommodate donor cells. This way, we can keep the host cells and bypass irradiation,” Varghese said in a press release.
The synthetic transplants consisted of two layers of hydrogel matrices: an outer layer containing calcium phosphate minerals and an inner layer, which the researchers filled with stem cells from donor mice. The researchers inserted the artificial bones under the skin of recipient ...
