Cellular therapy has emerged as a new potential tool for curing a wide variety of degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s diseases, spinal cord injury, hepatocirrhosis, myocardial infarction and diabetes for improving their quality of life (QOL). Three essential factors are necessary for cell transplantation therapy: stem cells, which retain the capacity to renew themselves and able to restore damaged tissue with high proliferability and differentiability; the scaffolds that support them; and growth and differentiation factors. Stem cells isolated from embryos (embryonic stem (ES) cells) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) are currently thought to be a source of cells for regenerative medicine. However, despite their therapeutic potential, ES cell has ethical issues surrounding the use of material from embryos and is required to overcome the risks of tumor formation by un-differentiated ES cells and graft rejection. The iPS cell also has a potential of tumorigenesis cause of induced exogenous genes. The bone marrow, neural stem cells and hematopoietic stem cells are usual source of adult stem cells for stem cell transplants and cellular therapy, but cells harvest requires surgical procedure with general anesthesia or sedation, and there seems to be a reduction of the proliferative potential and differentiation capacity of marrow mesenchymal stem cells in older donors.
For these reasons, we are interested in other sources of stem cells from the amniotic membrane that is a discarded tissue after parturition, thus avoiding the current controversies associated with the use of human embryonic stem cells. Also, these cells seem to possess characteristics of stem cells with multipotent differentiation ability, and low immunogenicity. Amniotic membrane has been proposed as a good candidate to be used in cellular therapy and regenerative medicine.
In our lab, we focus on the both of embryonic and somatic stem cell character of amniotic membrane and investigate their ability for applying source of regenerative medicine. And also we have generated “Hyper-dry-amnion” which expected the new material in the field of regenerative medicine and developing the new application for clinical usage.