Implantation of biomaterial as an efficient method to harvest mesenchymal stem cells

Autologous mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) transplants have been used successfully to treat a number of diseases, and patients undergoing cell transplantation must have stem cells collected before transplantation. In this study, we developed a new method to harvest MSCs. Biomaterials were implanted into the spatium intermuscular of mice hind limbs, and a large number of migrating cells (MCs) were isolated from the transplanted biomaterials. The adherent cells in MCs showed the characteristics of MSCs. Further comparative study demonstrated that the characteristics of MC-MSCs were similar to that of bone marrow (BM)-MSCs, including morphology, phenotype, proliferation potential, multilineage differentiation capacity and hematopoiesis-supportive function. The colony-forming unit-fibroblast frequency of the MCs was equivalent to approximately 20-fold of that of the BM. In addition, a BM transplantation experiment demonstrated that MC-MSCs were derived from the peripheral blood. In conclusion, we successfully establish an efficient method to harvest MSCs, and together with the distinct advantages of this method, such as accessibility and possibility for autologous cell therapy, we conclude that our efficient method may be a promising alternative for clinical application.