Towards Engraftment of New Stem Cells into Damaged Lungs

Perhaps the most important challenge in the field of regenerative medicine is to enable engraftment and survival of transplanted cells, allowing new cell populations to replace those made damaged or dysfunctional due to age, injury, or other causes. Despite some advances, survival of transplanted cells remains a significant challenge. Here is one example of signs of progress on this front, however. Judging by the recent past, solutions discovered by researchers are likely to continue to be tissue specific. This implies that a great deal more work lies ahead in order to build a usefully broad toolkit to allow creation and transplantation of suitable cells for all of the major tissues of interest, such as heart, lung, kidneys, liver, and so forth. Durable reconstitution of the distal lung epithelium with pluripotent stem cell (PSC) derivatives, if realized, would represent a promising therapy for diseases that result from alveolar damage. Here, we differentiate murine PSCs into self-renewing lung epithelial progenitors able to engraft into the injured distal lung epithelium of immunocompetent, syngeneic mouse recipients. After transplantation, these progenitors mature in the distal lung, assuming the molecular phenotypes of alveolar type 2 (AT2) and type 1 (AT1) cells. After months in vivo, donor-derived cells retain their mature phenotypes, as characterized by single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), histologic profiling, and functional assessment that demonstra...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs