2018/01/09
Keio University School of Medicine
Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development
A research group led by Associate Professor Toshiro Sato of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Keio University School of Medicine, has succeeded for the first time in the world in transplanting tissue stem cells cultured from normal human colonic mucosa into the intestinal tract of mice, allowing them to engraft in vivo, and observing the dynamics of normal human colonic epithelial cells over a long period of more than 10 months.
Previously, the research group led by Associate Professor Toshiro Sato had succeeded in the in vitro culture of stem cells that control the regeneration of human colonic mucosa and had also developed a technology to reconstruct cancer in vivo in mice.
However, no technology existed for transplanting normal adult human colonic stem cells into mice, which limited research methods for understanding the pathophysiology of and developing treatments for intestinal diseases and colorectal cancer. In this study, the researchers developed a technology to observe the dynamics of specific normal human colonic epithelial cells within the mouse intestinal tract by applying genome editing technology to the transplantation of stem cells cultured in vitro. This enabled the successful live observation of human colonic epithelial stem cells in vivo in mice, demonstrating the existence of normal human colonic stem cells in vivo, which had been presumed to exist based on experimental results in mice. This research provides a new means of studying human colorectal disease cells and is expected to lead to the elucidation of normal stem cell function with the aim of curing inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer, as well as the development of new therapies.
This research was published in the online edition of the American scientific journal "Cell Stem Cell" on December 28, 2017 (US Eastern Time).
Please see below for the full press release.