Programming cells to home to specific tissues may enable more effective cell-based therapies
Thursday, October 27, 2011 - 11:31
in Health & Medicine
Stem cell therapies hold enormous potential to address some of the most tragic illnesses, diseases, and tissue defects world-wide. However, the inability to target cells to tissues of interest poses a significant barrier to effective cell therapy. To address this hurdle, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have developed a platform approach to chemically incorporate homing receptors onto the surface of cells. This simple approach has the potential to improve the efficacy of many types of cell therapies by increasing the concentrations of cells at target locations in the body. These findings are published online in the journal Blood on Oct. 27, 2011.