Fetal stem cells repair the mother's heart
Specialists have long known that in half of cases, heart failure developing during pregnancy, called perinatal cardiomyopathy, spontaneously resolves within a few months after delivery. Based on this fact, researchers at Mount Sinai Medical School, New York, working under the guidance of Dr. Hina Chaudhry, suggested that fetal stem cells may play a role in the restoration of the mother's heart.
To clarify this issue, they crossed ordinary female mice with transgenic males, all of whose cells expressed a green fluorescent protein. Half of the embryos resulting from fertilization also expressed this protein, which made it possible to observe the further fate of fetal cells, whose ability to migrate through the placenta and persist in the mother's body for decades is a proven fact.
In the middle of pregnancy, scientists induced heart damage in female mice. Tissue analysis of the surviving animals showed that the fluorescent green cells of the fetuses migrated to the areas of damage to the heart tissue of the females and differentiated into cardiomyocytes, as well as smooth muscle and endothelial cells of the heart vessels.
After that, the researchers isolated the embryo cells that had taken root in the mother's heart and reproduced their spontaneous differentiation into contracting cardiomyocytes and vascular cells in vitro.
According to Dr. Chaudhry, embryonic stem cells have a huge potential for use in regenerative medicine, but obtaining them raises ethical issues related to the need to destroy a living human embryo. At the same time, fetal stem cells can be easily and in large quantities isolated from the placenta, which is usually disposed of after childbirth.
Moreover, it turned out that fetal cells isolated from the mother's heart express Cdx2 protein. The expression of this protein may indicate the functional immaturity of the surface molecules of such cells responsible for immunological recognition. Accordingly, the introduction of such cells to the patient with a low degree of probability will cause serious rejection reactions.
Experts believe that the potential of placental stem cells is not limited to the treatment of heart diseases. During the described experiments, fetal cells migrated only to the areas of damage to the heart and were not detected in other tissues of the mother, which indicates the need for further study of the potential participation of these cells in the restoration of damage to other organs.
Article by Rina J. Kara et al. Fetal Cells Traffic to Injured Maternal Myocardium and Undergo Cardiac Differentiation is published in the journal Circulation Research.
Evgeniya Ryabtseva
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on the materials of Mount Sinai School of Medicine:
Fetal Cells From Placenta May Help Maternal Heart Recover From Injury.
23.11.2011