Stem cell discovery has potential to improve cancer treatment

Two recent discoveries by Sinai stem cell scientists may help improve the efficiency of cancer treatments and shorten the time people take to recover from radiation and chemotherapy

In the first study, published in the journal Blood, researchers discovered a protein expressed by blood stem cells that could help identify, study and deploy cells for therapy

"We show that this protein, syndecan-2, recognizes primitive blood stem cells and regulates stem cell function," said John Chute, Ph.

Hematopoietic stem cells are found in small numbers in the bone marrow and peripheral blood, which flows through the heart, arteries, capillaries and veins

This approach faces a major challenge: Hematopoietic stem cells make up less than 0.

To study this phenomenon, researchers in Chute's lab, led by first author Christina M.

The researchers found that this protein plays an important role in the reproduction of blood stem cells

By transplanting only cells that express syndecan-2, it may be possible to make blood stem cell transplants more effective and less toxic

second discovery

The second finding by Chute and his team, published in the journal Nature Communications, sheds light on the mechanism by which blood vessels in the bone marrow respond to injury, such as chemotherapy or radiation

When people receive radiation or chemotherapy as part of their cancer treatment, their blood counts plummet

Chute and his colleagues found that when mice received radiation therapy, cells lining the blood vessels in the bone marrow produced a protein called semaphorin 3A

When the researchers blocked the ability of these blood vessel cells to produce sphingomyelin 1 or semaphorin 3A, or injected an antibody that blocks semaphorin 3A's communication with semaphore 1, the bone marrow vasculature regenerated after irradiation

"We discovered a mechanism that appears to control the regeneration of blood vessels after injury," said Chute, the paper's senior author

Terni, a postdoctoral scientist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, is the first author of both studies

article title

Syndecan-2 enriches for hematopoietic stem cells and regulates stem cell repopulating capacity