The Use of Adult Stem Cells to Study the Etiopathogeny of Cleft Lip and Palate and Tissue Engineering / Uso de células tronco adultas para estudo da etiopatogenia das fissuras lábio palatinas e bioengenharia de tecidos

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2007

RESUMO

Clefts involving the lip and palate (CLP) or palate only (CP) represent the most frequent facial malformation during birth and correspond to approximately 25% of all congenital defects. The incidence of this problem is high; corresponding to approximately 1:700 births, but is different among the ethnic groups. Clefts represent a major health problem due to the requirement of a mutidisciplinary team to deal with the esthetical and funcional reabilitation needs of these patients from birth to, in some cases, adult life, resulting in a high treatment cost. There still many controversies about the ethiology of non-syndomic CLP, even though there are researchers all over the world trying to identify the factors causing this pathology. Our work consisted to establish and characterize 23 adult stem cells (ASC) linages obtained from falling teeth dental pulp (5 controls, 5 non-syndomic CLP patients and 1 Van der Woude syndrome patient), orbicular oris muscle (5 non-syndomic CLP patients), bone marrow (2 non-syndomic CLP patients) and adipose tissue (5 controls). The objectives were to use these lineages to help elucidate the genetic mechanisms involved in the development of non-syndomic CLP, as well as, to bioengineer tissues affected by this pathology, mainly bone tissue. The protocols we used are easily reproductible and we demonstrate that our different ASC linages have in vitro plasticity to osteogenic differentiation, as well as, the lineages obtained from dental pulp and orbicular oris muscle have osteogenic, muscular, condrogenic and adipogenic plasticity. Further more our experiments demonstrate that these ASC lineages have the capacity to regenerate major bone defects in non-immunocompromised Wistar rats, which did not develop any kind of rejection against these human cells. We have used a new methodology to study the molecular mechanisms involved in CLP, which consisted in comparing the mRNA expression profile of ASC from non-syndomic CLP patients and controls, using microarrays. We observed that 367 genes were differently expressed between the two groups and all these genes have a higher expression in samples from nonsyndomic CLP patients, thus suggesting that this is a promising strategy to study the molecular mechanisms involved in CLP. In conclusion, studies involving ASC from non-syndomic CLP patients and controls are important not only to tissue bioengineering, but also to elucidate the molecular mechanisms involved in CLP.

ASSUNTO(S)

fissuras lábio palatinas cleft lip and palate stem cells tissue engineering células tronco bioengenharia de tecidos

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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