What a wonderfully weird article from Japanese researchers on stem cells to brighten up one's day. At the American College of Cardiology, doctors from the Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo announced the collection of menstrual blood from six women and harvested the stem cells that originated in the lining of the uterus, obtaining 30x more stem cells than bone marrow. In taking this very interesting approach of attempting to convert "waste" to "wealth", I wonder if the harvesting of these cells could be done in a sterile, non-contaminated manner. With all the existing challenges in ensuring a clean collection of cord blood stem cells, and taking an angle from a standpoint of storing and potentially using these cells in therapy as claimed in the article, I wonder if there needs to be a special contraption to collect the stem cells directly from the lining or perhaps at the cervix itself to prevent the usual flora from contaminating the collected unit. On the otherhand, the opportunity to collect it would be once a month! (So if the collection fails this month, give it another go next month...?)
Furthermore, the stem cells were cultured to induce cardiac cell formation and demonstrated contractile ability after 5 days. I thought this was quite a short time, but without reading the full article, its hard to draw any conclusions.
The researcher also emphasized the point that cells obtained from a younger patients would have a longer lifespan than cells harvested from older donors. This is the same reasoning as banking stem cells from cord blood of newborns and choosing a younger donor for blood stem cells. It would be interesting to see if this source of stem cells can be safely banked and used as a viable source of transplantation.
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2 comments:
I'm doing my thesis on a new internal menstruation product. I was looking at women that collect their menstrual flow to use on their plants, and was trying to see if there were other needs for collecting menstrual flow. This article is very interesting. Please let me know what you ideas on a menstrual product that would collect blood for stem cells would be like. How often and how much blood would need to be collected, or what could be done with it afterwards. Thank you.
Thanks for your interesting comment. I'm not really sure about the instruments for menstrual collection, but from my quick searches, it appears that most of the products revolve around synthetic insertable liquid containers.
I've no experience with these (am not sure that these products are available in Asia or Malaysia) but imagine that it could be quite tricky to design for a clean collection.
Off the cuff, menstrual volumes range between 10-80 ml with an average volume of 35 ml over 3-5 days, which is a daily average of 7-10 ml. With regards to the collection of this blood for stem cell applications, I imagine that it is probably quite challenging to obtain sufficient amounts to use "as is". Therefore, growing up the cells would be necessary and could make it pretty expensive as a source.
Thus, the issues are as follows:
1. Obtaining a clean (uncontaminated collection- the vagina is a non-sterile environment)
2. Obtaining sufficient blood which would yield stem cells (blood may be clotted)
3. Obtaining the blood comfortably and easily over the extended period of time.
Unlike the application for plants (root nutrition presumably?), stem cell applications might be a little trickier, and small doses must be harvested quickly and put through a purification process.
I apologise for the lack of a proper answer, but I'll keep thinking about it and let you know if I come up with anything more concrete!
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