| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 生物科技研究所 === 92 === Following the birth of a baby, umbilical cord blood is usually discarded along with the placenta. However, now researchers know that blood retrieved from the umbilical cord is a rich source of stem cells.
Like bone marrow is used for transplantion, cord blood stem cells may eventually play a key role, just as bone marrow stem cells do, in curing some genetic disorders that affect the blood and immune system. Umbilical cord blood contains a high amount of hematopoietic stem cells and mesenchymal stem/progenitor cells. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) comprise of multipotent progenitors capable of helping hematopoiesis and differentiating into many lineages of mesodermic tissues (osteogenic, adipogenic, chondrogenic, myogenic, cardiomyogenic, etc.). Studies suggest that stem cells from cord blood provide some important advantages over those retrieved from bone marrow: much easier to get, easier to use, smaller amount of cord blood needed and potential for gene therapy.
In this study, we have established mesenchymal stem cells in culture from human umbilical cord blood and evaluated their ability as well as characteristic. The results showed that the isolated mesenchymal stem cells displayed a fibroblast-like morphology and expressed the mesenchymal-related antigens (SH2, SH3, SH4, CD44, CD90 and CD13). We could induce the MSCs in the culture into adipocytes and osteoblasts. In addition, the number of mesenchymal stem cells in monouclear cells (MNC) of the human umbilical cord blood was about 1 MSC per 107 MNC in 47 samples.
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