Healing cells

What is it about?

In the case of a lesion the organism (in our study a mouse) proceeds to heal the lesion. To do this it needs cells that can colonize the lesion and substitute damaged cells. This is obtained in part by the cells surrounding the lesion and in another part by stem cells that colonize the lesion and differentiate into the cell types needed for healing. Differentiation means that a stem cell becomes a normal cell of different tissue types. In the presetn work we show that in healthy animals there is, among the blood cells, a population of tiny cells that have the ability to rapidly colonize the site of lesion (in our case a bone fracture) where they settle and differentiate into various cell types: bone cells, cartilage cells, muscle cells and others.

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Why is it important?

It is very liklely that similar cells exist in humans (and our study yielkds the key to isolate them). If we were able to isolate and eventually to grow these cells in a petri dish we would have a source of healing cells. This could be useful in the case of planned surgery where the patient could donate his healing cells before surgery to inject them once surgery has been done or people could even wish to "bank" their healing cells to use them once they should need them after an injury. Obviously, these cells are also the template for the development of cells for tissue engineering.

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