Featured Articles

Early Intravenous Infusion of Mesenchymal Stromal Cells Exerts a Tissue Source Age-Dependent Beneficial Effect on Neurovascular Integrity and Neurobehavioral Recovery After Traumatic Cervical Spinal Cord Injury
Reaz Vawda, et al., STEM CELLS Translational Medicine

Although mesenchymal stromal cell therapy is an attractive therapeutic approach for traumatic spinal cord injury, the importance of tissue source age in therapeutic efficacy remains largely unknown. For this reason, this study aimed to compare human umbilical cord-derived fetal cells of distinct ages. Importantly, this work identified several key similarities and differences on several long-term histological as well as functional parameters. Therefore, these results can help to optimize cell treatment strategies for clinical translation.

Chromosome Transplantation: Correction of the Chronic Granulomatous Disease Defect in Mouse Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells
Alessandra Castelli, et al., STEM CELLS

A lot of genetic diseases involving chromosome abnormalities cannot be treated by conventional gene therapy approaches. This study applied chromosome transplantation, a new genomic therapy method that has been recently developed, to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from an X-linked mouse disease model. As a proof of principle, this study demonstrated that X-chromosome-transplanted corrected cells restored the normal function to differentiated cells. Although all the strategies based on iPSCs are still far away from the clinic, it is believed that the results establish an important step for the usefulness of this kind of genomic therapy in selected patients.