MONDAY, Jan. 23 (HealthDay News) -- Angiopoietin-like proteins may be useful for growing hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) used for bone marrow transplantation, according to a report published online Jan. 22 in Nature Medicine. The technique could greatly benefit treatment of cancer and other blood disorders.
HSCs undergo rapid expansion in the developing embryonic liver, and liver cell lines derived from mouse embryos have been used to expand murine cells in culture. However, the secreted components responsible for these effects are not well known. To identify potent stimulators of stem cell growth, Harvey F. Lodish, Ph.D., from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., and colleagues performed microarray analysis of the mouse CD3+ liver cell line, E15.
Compared with other liver cell lines that do not support stem cell expansion, E15 cells specifically expressed angiopoietin-like 2 and angiopoietin-like 3 proteins. The investigators found that supplementing the culture media with these factors produced up to 30-fold expansion of mouse bone marrow cells over 10 days, 10 times higher than previously achieved.
If such factors can stimulate human cell growth, they "may be useful in ex vivo expansion of these cells as part of an HSC transplantation or gene therapy protocol," the authors conclude.
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