In addition to the bone marrow there is another factory of blood constituents: the lungs, which could become a source of life -saving stem cells.
The bone marrow is assisted, in the difficult enterprise of supplying the human body of blood, from the lungs: a study in the scientific journal Blood has shown that Even the bodies deputied to breathing take care of manufacture the basic components of the blood. A news that could have important implications for stem cell transplants in patients with hematological diseases.
Progenious cells. The hematopoietic stem cells They are progenitor cells, not yet ripe, of all the elements constituting blood: white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets. For decades it was thought that they were only in the bone marrowthe soft tissue inside the cavities of the bones (especially the long and flat ones) or in the blood of the umbilical cord at the time of birth.
An alternative venue. In recent years, however, it had emerged that in mice, half of the plateletsthe fragments of cells that favor blood coagulation, they are produced by the lungs. And that the rodents’ pulmonary stem cells also produce red blood cells, megacariocytes (the precursors of the platelets) and different types of immune cells. In the new study, a team from the University of California-San Francisco has shown that something similar also takes place in humans.
A factory of a certain importance. A group of scientists led by Mark Looney, professor of medicine and laboratory medicine of the Californian university, has obtained samples of lung tissue, bone marrow and blood of donors and compared the cells inside them. Not only In the lungs, hematopoietic stem cells were found that resembled a lot of bone marrowsbut these were also present in similar quantities. The proof of the fact that the lungs are not at all a “escort wheel” in the production of blood.
The physical arrangement of the stem cells between the lung blood vessels also recalls the one they occupy in the bone marrow. In short, I’m right where they must be, they are not “passing through”.
Complementary roles. To understand if the hematopoietic stem cells of the lungs were “productive”, the scientists put them to mature in petri plates, and found that they were as active as the counterparties, Especially in creating red and megacariocyle blood cells; The colonies of bone marrow stem cells were more inclined to produce immune cells.
Profitable exchanges. According to the authors of the work, the hematopoietic stem of the lungs would constitute a reserve that activates the body each time needs more quantities than any element of the blood.
In fact, it is believed that lungs and bone marrows can send each other to hematopoietic stem in the event of a shortage in one or the other organ. In fact, completing each otheras already observed in mice.
A gold mine. Finally, when the scientists analyzed the cell signature of the isolated stem for bone marrow transplants, they discovered that a fifth of them actually came from the donor’s lungs and not from the bone marrow. Now that we know about the existence of this population of stem cells, the possibility of Take advantage of it for transplants which could save life to patients with blood diseases, such as leukemia.
