Concise Review: Human Umbilical Cord Stroma with Regard to the Source of Fetus-Derived Stem Cells

Abstract

Human umbilical cord (UC) has been a tissue of increasing interest in recent years. Many groups have shown the stem cell potency of stromal cells isolated from the human UC mesenchymal tissue, namely, Wharton's jelly. Since UC is a postnatal organ discarded after birth, the collection of cells does not require an invasive procedure with ethical concerns. Stromal cells, as the dominant cells of this fetusderived tissue, possess multipotent properties between embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. They bear a relatively higher proliferation rate and self-renewal capacity. Although they share common surface markers with bone marrow-derived MSCs, they also express certain embryonic stem cell markers, albeit in low levels. Without any spontaneous differentiation, they can be successfully differentiated into mature adipocytes, osteoblasts, chondrocytes, skeletal myocytes, cardiomyocytes, neurons, and endothelial cells. While causing no immunorejection reaction, they effectively function in vivo as dopaminergic neurons, myocytes, and endothelial cells. Given these characteristics, particularly the plasticity and developmental flexibility, UC stromal cells are now considered an alternative source of stem cells and deserve to be examined in long-term clinical trials. This review first aims to document the published findings so far regarding the nature of human UC stroma with special emphasis on the spatial distribution and functional structure of stromal cells and matrix, which serves as a niche for residing cells, and, secondly, to assess the in vitro and in vivo experiments in which differential stem cell potencies were evaluated.

Insulin‐like growth factor‐I improves chondrogenesis of predifferentiated human umbilical cord mesenchymal stromal cells

“…1,2 It should be noted that, as with other cell sources, there may be slight variations among hUCMSCs from different individuals. Although only one donor cord was used in the current study to reduce the number of human subjects required, the results are consistent with a previous 13 study and another preliminary study, using hUCMSCs from different cords, under chondrogenic conditions in terms of GAG and HYP content per cell (23-25 pg and 3.5-8.5 pg, respectively) and also immunohistochemical staining with collagen I, collagen II, and aggrecan.…”

“…Umbilical cord mesenchymal stromal cells (UCMSCs), extracted from Wharton's jelly of umbilical cords, 1 are a primitive stromal population that possess the characteristics of mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) defined by the International Society for Cellular Therapy (ISCT). 2,3 Human UCMSCs (hUCMSCs) express surface markers that were identified with other mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) such as CD73, CD90, CD105, and are negative for hematopoietic markers such as CD34 and CD45.…”

A novel way to isolate MSCs from umbilical cords

“…There are four methods reported to separate MSCs: (i) flow cytometrical sorting [12]; (ii) magnetic separation [13]; (iii) density gradient centrifugation [14]; and (iv) the cell plastic adherence method [15,16]. Since there are no specific surface markers for MSCs, it is difficult to separate MSCs from the digested cell pellet [17].…”

State of the art and future perspectives of articular cartilage regeneration: a focus on adipose-derived stem cells and platelet-derived products

“…Hyaluronic acid represents the most abundant GAG (Sobolewski et al, 1997), which provides a gel-like environment for embedded immature progenitor cells and differentiated myofibroblast-like cells (McElreavey et al, 1991;Nanaev et al, 1997). Termed 'human umbilical cord matrix cells' (HUCM), the immature progenitor cells have been found to possess multipotent differentiation capacity, as indicated by successful transformation into adipocytes, chondrocytes, osteoblasts and myoblasts (Can and Karahuseyinoglu, 2007). A few studies focused on chondrogenic differentiation of HUCM in 3D culture, during which GAGs as well as collagen I and II were detected histologically (Bailey et al, 2007;Karahuseyinoglu et al, 2007;Wang et al, 2004Wang et al, , 2008.…”