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LIFE SCIENCES, EUROPE
 From blood to bone: the science, the story
With the help of EU funding, a new life sciences project plans to use Europe’s vast bank of cord blood as a starting point for repairing bone defects and fractures. Among the results could be help for the thousands of patients requiring hip replacements every year.
 | EU research to make, among other things, hip replacements more durable.
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Researchers from four European countries – Denmark, Germany, Portugal and the UK – will spend the next three years and €2.5 million in EU money finding a viable new medical use for the two million units of umbilical cord blood banked in Europe, and currently used for transfusions and treating leukaemia.
“The mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in cord blood appear similar to bone marrow stem cells but they are hard to locate,” says York University’s Paul Genever who heads the Biomedical Tissue Research Group and is coordinating the ‘blood-to-bone’ project. “We aim to isolate and expand them so we have enough cells to use in therapies.”
The team also wants to compare them with bone marrow and embryonic stem cells and investigate how to turn them into bone structures for use as 3D bone replacements. Genever said that, if the creation of bone structures from stem cells proves viable, it might be used for cell-based therapies to repair bone defects and fractures. Ultimately, bone structures developed in this way could be used to make hip replacements more durable. To date, some ten million have been performed worldwide.
Weight of evidence
The project, called Exploring the potential of human umbilical cord-blood stem cells for application other than allogeneic haematopoietic transplantations, is a Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) Strategic Targeted Research Project (STREP). STREPS are a traditional funding instrument aimed at improving European competitiveness or meeting the needs of society or Community policies.
The university’s Science and Technology Studies Unit and Sociology Department will link the scientific questions of MSC isolation and expansion to the wider environment. From this, they can define potential barriers and areas of weakness in their use.
The researchers will consider questions, such as safety and standards, commercial viability, potential investment, consensus amongst scientists and clinical distribution. Including academics from York University’s Departments of Sociology and Philosophy is seen as a critical part of the project, assessing ethical questions which may arise during the research.
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Source:
AlphaGalileo, EU research project
Contact:
Research Contacts page
More information:
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