/ News, Research
Human bone marrow model paves the way to reduce animal testing (Martin Lab)
Big news from our Tissue Engineering lab! The lab has taken an important step toward developing research methods that rely less on animal experiments, and have created a highly complex model of the bone marrow in the laboratory made entirely from human cells—replicating human bone marrow in an unprecedented way. Their work, published in Cell Stem Cell by the team led by Professor Ivan Martin and Dr. Andrés García García, relies on a new system that mimics the specialized microenvironment that supports blood cell development, incorporating the essential cellular and structural features of human bone marrow, like the bone, blood vessels, immune cells, and nerves. Typically, research on blood development, bone marrow failure, and blood cancers often depend on animal models or simple cell cultures that do not fully reflect the human situation. This new model, however, reflects human biology much more closely.
To build the model, the group used a supporting framework made of hydroxyapatite, the mineral that forms the structural basis of natural bone. Reprogrammed human pluripotent stem cells were then introduced into this bone scaffold. Under carefully guided conditions, these stem cells differentiated into a wide range of cell types typically found in bone marrow. The resulting three-dimensional tissue—approximately eight millimeters in diameter and four millimeters thick—closely replicated the features of the human bone marrow in direct contact with the bone, and was capable of sustaining human blood formation in the laboratory for several weeks. The model opens new perspectives to better understand the mechanisms governing the cross-talk between human blood stem cells and their microenvironment, which might enable researchers to identify new therapeutic targets for blood cancers.
The model may also have future applications in the pharmaceutical industry for drug testing, but first it would need to be miniaturized. Looking further ahead, the approach could open possibilities for personalized therapies in blood cancers. Patient-derived cells could be used to create individualized bone marrow models, allowing the comparsion of different treatments to identify the most effective for each patient. The researchers emphasize, however, that achieving this level of personalization will require additional refinement of the method.
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