What is Cell Therapy?

The human body contains over 200 different specialised cell types, such as muscle, bone or brain cells. These cells carry out specific functions within the body, necessary for the health of an organism. Injury, disease or ageing can lead to the loss of specialised cells from the body. In many cases, such loss is irreversible, meaning that the diseased or lost cells can no longer be replenished by healthy ones.

Cell therapy aims to introduce new, healthy cells into a patient’s body, to replace the diseased or missing ones. A challenge for this type of therapy is having enough cells for transplantation into a patient. This is because specialised cells, such as brain cells, are difficult to obtain from the human body. Also, specialised cells typically have a limited ability to multiply, making it difficult to produce sufficient numbers of cells required for certain cell therapies. Some of these issues can be overcome through the use of stem cells.

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How are stem cell used to develop cell therapies?

Stem cells are unspecialised cells that have the ability to develop into other functional cell types. Importantly, some types of stem cells can be grown outside of the human body, thus allowing the production of a large number of cells required for successful applications of cell therapy in medicine. Two main types of stem cells are being explored in the context of cell therapy: pluripotent stem cells and tissue-specific (also referred to as adult) stem cells.

Have cell therapies been successfully used?

Some cell therapies have been successfully used for many years now. The oldest example is the bone marrow transplant, which is routinely used in medicine to effectively treat certain diseases of the blood and immune system, such as leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma. The bone marrow transplant contains blood stem cells which can replenish the blood and immune system upon transplantation into the recipient. This type of stem cell treatment has provided an important proof-of-principal for using cell therapies to treat patients. More recently, stem cells from the eye (limbal stem cells) have also been used to treat eye injuries. In some cases, stem cells are first modified by gene therapy to correct the mutation causing the disease. Once the disease-causing mutation is corrected, the cells are delivered to patients to repopulate the diseased areas of their body. This so called combined cell and gene therapy allowed the development of therapies for blood disorders, including some types of leukaemia, lymphoma, severe combined immunodeficiency and β-thalassemia.

Top cell therapy companies

Kolon TissueGene, MEDIPOST, JCR Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd., Stemedica Cell Technologies, Osiris Therapeutics, NuVasive, Fibrocell Science, Vericel Corporation, Cells for Cells, Celgene Corporation

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Reference

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