Engineering Mesenchymal Stem Cells for COPD Therapy

Case ID:

2016-003

BACKGROUND

The discovery of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have resulted in a plethora of opportunities to produce tissue-specific cell types for disease modeling, drug screening and treatments for diseases. For pulmonary diseases such as COPD, stem cells have been a proposed strategy to repair damaged lungs. However, these studies have yielded controversial results. Additional research has demonstrated that transplantation of alveolar epithelial cells (AECs) hold great promise to repair damaged lungs for pulmonary diseases, including COPD. However, the conversion of stem cells to AECs has proven to be difficult with extremely low differentiation percentages. This major barrier has hampered implementation of AEC cells for use in therapies, disease modeling, drug screening and other areas of pulmonary research. Given that over 300 million dollars of NIH money is awarded each year to pulmonary researchers, and that the pulmonary drug and drug delivery market is estimated to reach 43.9 billion dollars by 2018, developing methods to efficiently produce AECs would be beneficial.

SUMMARY OF TECHNOLOGY

Researchers at Oklahoma State have developed a method that can induce 90% differentiation of iPSCs or MSCs into AECs (type II) under stimulation of proper growth factors and growing on an appropriate matrix. These cells expressed type II cell markers surfactant protein C and ABCA3, secrete lung surfactant in response to lung surfactant secretagogues and trans-differentiate into type I AECs. In addition, the researchers have demonstrated that the AEC cells attenuated in a mouse model of COPD. The potential uses for these cells include cellular-based therapies, drug screening, disease modeling and pulmonary research.

POTENTIAL AREAS OF APPLICATION