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Dr. John Dick, a Senior Scientist at the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine and the Ontario Cancer Institute, University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, has just published a paper1 describing the isolation and characterization of the human blood stem cell. Up until now, the true identity of the human blood stem cell had not been defined and all studies with human blood stem cells have been conducted using a mixture of cells which contain the blood stem cell. The feat of identifying the human blood stem cell has been likened to finding a needle in a haystack by Dr. Mick Bhatia, the Scientific Director of the Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute at McMaster University.
So what is the impact of this discovery? Well, worldwide it is estimated that two-thirds of patients in need of a bone marrow transplant never find a proper match. Cord blood is being used more and more frequently as a source of blood stem cells for bone marrow transplantation. The use of cord blood, in adults, however is limited due to the restricted number of blood stem cells that are typically present in a cord blood unit. The identification of the true blood stem cell will allow the development of technologies to specifically expand these cells which, hopefully, will allow the treatment of more patients in need of a blood stem cell transplant.
1Science 2011 333(6039) 218-213 Isolation of Single human hematopoitic stem cells capable of long-term multilineage engraftment