What a fatty waste ----- Straight from the frying pan

All like to be fashionable. All like to be trendy. Nowadays lean is said to be the in thing. Nobody likes to be fat. All want to remain fit & beautiful. But a recent news in a local news paper read the news that scientists have created a material from fat cells that can someday be used along with stem cells to repair tissues & organs without fear of rejection.

These fat cells are derived from the body adipose tissue (body fat). These fat cells in the future will be used along with stem cells to repair tissues & organs without the fear of rejection.

The idea is to stimlate the fat cell to secrete a basement membrane which would resemble that tissues structurally, which help in cell growth. The cell attach to the membrane & form a network. When the cells have matured into the desied tissue, they secrete another substance that breaks down & destroys the scaffold.

Currently companies commonly use Matrigel, a protein mixture secreted by mouse cancer cells, but cannot be injected in humans.

This concept is also valuable for pharmaceutical companies for testing drugs in vitro.

The substance derived from the secretions, called Adipogel, has proven effective for growing hepatocytes - primary liver cells.

Deepak Nagrath, a professor of chemical & biomolecular engineering at Rice University is working on this project. His approch is to force the cells to secrete a natural matrix which is a honey like gel that retains the natural growth factors, cytokines & hormones in the original tissues. Another method reported in Nature Nanotechnology uses magnetic levitation to grow three dimensional cell cultures.

Once he is sucessful in his experiment, Adipogel may be just the ticket for tranplanting cells to repair organs. According to Deepak this matrix can be used as an adipogenic scaffold for stem cells & transplant it into the body where an organ is damaged. Hopefully these cells & Adipogel can take over & improve their functionality.

But there were so many thoughts that ran through my mind after reading about this in a local newspaper. Stem cell therapy itself is taking time to develop with only cord blood cells which are banked & used in limited manner. Already there have been many other methods like viral vectors to deliver stem cell. How long will Adipogel therapy take to develop & what are the chances of its sucess??? Even after its sucessful launch in future, cost issues also have to be considered. Again emotional & ethical issues would have to be considered in this matter, as have come up with stem cells.

Lot many questions would arise in minds of many readers & much research needs to be done in this aspect before it is used therapeutically in future.