Doctors are planning to send bone marrow-derived stem cells into space to help them grow faster, according to Margo Kim, reporting from Fresno, California. Experiments have demonstrated that stem cells can grow from five to ten times faster in microgravity than they do on Earth. This is compelling information for Abba Zubair, M.D., Ph.D., medical director of Transfusion Medicine and Stem Cell Therapy at Mayo Clinic, Florida, who wants to use millions of stem cells to treat patients with hemorrhagic and ischemic strokes.
Zero Gravity Speeds Up Cell Growth
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According to Zubair, there are no treatment options available to doctors or patients which can help regenerate brain tissue damage caused by stroke. Stem cells could become a treatment if doctors would be able to grow a quantity of material quickly enough for such treatments to become viable. “Based on our experience with bone marrow transplant you need about 200 to 500 million cells, ” Zubair said. Conventionally grown stem cells take a month to grow that many cells.
Zubair reports that doctors at the Cleveland Clinic are currently planning to send stem cells to the international space station to have them grown in the microgravity environment in space. The stem cells will be taken to the international space station within a year, he said. While one batch of cells is grown in space, another control batch will be grown on Earth. Other than the appearance of gravity the growing environments will be the same. If this works, Zubair notes, it would allow massive numbers of stem cells needed for stroke treatments, to be grown much more quickly than they presently can be on Earth.
Zubair hopes that growing vast quantities of stem cells in space will allow for the regeneration of neurons and blood vessels in hemorrhagic stroke patients. “I think this will revolutionize how we treat stroke patients, not only hemorrhagic but even the ischemic stroke, which is much more common, ” he said. Looking ahead, Zubair believes that if the lack of gravity proves to be a better environment for stem cell growth, then the next step will be to transform the cells into tissue, and ultimately into organs.
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This is a fascinating development. In my practice we've seen similar outcomes with the revised protocol. The key differentiator seems to be patient selection criteria. Has anyone else noticed the correlation with BMI thresholds?
Great point. I'd push back slightly on the conclusion, the sample size in the cited study is too small to draw population-level inferences. That said, the directional signal is compelling and worth a larger RCT.
We implemented a similar approach last year. Early results are promising but we're still gathering 12-month follow-up data. Happy to share our protocol if anyone is interested.
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