Bone regeneration using Wharton's Jelly mesenchymal stem cells

Abstract

Wharton's jelly (WJ) is one of tissues where mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are present. WJ, whose abundant tissue volume is noninvasively available from the neonate at birth, has good clinical applicability to the patient him/herself if allowed to be used as autologous tissue. We confirmed WJ-MSCs' self-renewal capability and multilineage differentiation potential in vitro. Furthermore, the differentiation of WJ-MSCs into osteoblasts was verified in vivo. Our experiences to date give us the impression that Bone marrow (BM)-MSCs have better osteogenic potential compared with WJ-MSCs. On the other hand, another group of researchers reported better osteogenic potential for WJ-MCSs than for BM-MSCs. It is possible that osteogenic potential differs between WJ-MSCs and BM-MSCs. It is not easy to determine the superiority of osteogenic potential between WJ-MSCs and BM-MSCs. Regardless of their superiority, nevertheless, the clinical applications of WJ-MSCs are promising because of their nature of autologous tissue with osteogenic potential that can be attained without surgical invasion. Safety issues (e.g., infection and risk for canceration) should also be resolved. In addition, we consider that a long-term investigation is required to examine time-course changes in implanted and surrounding tissues.