Cancer cytotherapy using umbilical cord matrix stem cells

Development of umbilical cord matrix stem cell-based cytotherapy for human cancer Cytotherapy using umbilical cord matrix stem cells (USMSC) is and ongoing collaborative research project of the KSU stem cell research group. UCMSC are more useful for cancer therapy than other stem cells since they are easy to prepare in relatively large quantities from post-delivery umbilical cords and pose no ethical issues (Mitchell et al., 2003). They are potentially quite applicable to human patients without a complete genetic match, since they are unlikely to induce an acute immune response (Weiss et al., 2008). The following studies have been performed to determine the therapeutic potential of UCMSC in tumor growth attenuation: a) the efficacy of rat UCMSC on tumor growth attenuation of Mat B III rat adenocarcinoma cell line in vitro and in vivo (Ganta et al., 2009): b) the efficacy of un-engineered human UCMSCs on attenuation of human breast cancer xenografts in a SCID mouse model (Ayuzawa et al., 2009): c) determination of the therapeutic potential of IFN-β expressing human UCMSCs (Matsuzuka et al., 2010) and naïve rat UCMSC (Maurya et al., 2010) against lung cancer using an LLC tumor model in syngeneic immunocompetent mice.