Human Mesenchymal Stromal Cells (hMSC) have the potential to differentiate into lineages of mesoderm origin, such as osteogenic, chondrogenic, and adipogenic lineages, presenting a promising potential for autologous regenerative medicine applications. However, one of the major challenges associated with delivering hMSC to the clinic is the propagation of undifferentiated cells in vitro in order...

Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC) are easily isolated from the bone marrow by adherence to plastic surfaces. These cells show self-renewal capacity and multipotency. A unique feature of hMSC is their capacity to survive without serum. Under this condition hMSC neither proliferate nor differentiate but maintain their biological properties unaffected. Therefore, this should be a perfect platfor...

Races in Message Sequence Charts may lead to a bad interpretation of described behaviours, and are often considered as a design error. While there is a quadratictime algorithm detecting races in Basic Message Sequence Charts (BMSCs), the problem is undecidable for High-level Message Sequence Charts (HMSCs). To improve this negative situation for HMSCs, we introduce two new notions: a new concep...

BACKGROUND The conventional expansion of human mesenchymal stromal cells (hMSC) for tissue engineering or (pre-) clinical investigation includes the use of 10% fetal bovine serum (FBS). However, there exists immense lot-to-lot variability in FBS samples and time consuming as well as cost intensive lot pre-testing is essential to guarantee optimal hMSC proliferation and stem cells characteristic...

Human mesenchymal stem cell (hMSC) therapies are currently progressing through clinical development, driving the need for consistent, and cost effective manufacturing processes to meet the lot-sizes required for commercial production. The use of animal-derived serum is common in hMSC culture but has many drawbacks such as limited supply, lot-to-lot variability, increased regulatory burden, poss...

Transplantation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) derived from bone marrow has been shown to improve functional outcome in spinal cord injury (SCI). We transplanted MSCs derived from human bone marrow (hMSCs) to study their potential therapeutic effect in SCI in the rat. In addition to hMSCs, we used gene-modified hMSCs to secrete brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF-hMSCs). After a dorsal tr...

The laminin family of proteins is critical for managing a variety of cellular activities including migration, adhesion, and differentiation. In bone, the roles of laminins in controlling osteogenic differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC) are unknown. We report here that laminin-5 is found in bone and expressed by hMSC. hMSC isolated from bone synthesize laminin-5 and adhere to ex...

The manufacture of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) for clinical applications requires an appropriate growth surface and an optimized, preferably chemically defined medium (CDM) for expansion. We investigated a new protein/peptide-free CDM that supports the adhesion, growth, and detachment of an immortalized hMSC line (hMSC-TERT) as well as primary cells derived from bone marrow (bm-hMSCs) ...

BACKGROUND Glioblastoma multiforme is the most lethal brain tumor with limited therapeutic options. Antigens expressed on the surface of malignant cells are potential targets for antibody-mediated gene/drug delivery. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS In this study, we investigated the ability of genetically modified human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) expressing a single-chain antibody (scFv) on their surf...

We recently reported that laminin-5, expressed by human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC), stimulates osteogenic gene expression in these cells in the absence of any other osteogenic stimulus. Here we employ two dimensional liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry, along with the Database for Annotation, Visualization and Integrated Discovery (DAVID), to obtain a more comprehensive profil...