Rationale/Current Status/Future

There are several published studies in animals that have documented the positive clinical effect of delivering bone marrow mononuclear cells

Autologous stem cells have advantage in terms of immune compatibility and ethical issues.

Two major lines of investigation have emerged –one advocating stem cell enrichment only and the other doing expansion with or without differentiating these endogenous stem cells.

Culture of stem cells though increases the number but there are concerns of  induction of mutations, change the behaviour of cells etc.

Enrichment has the advantage of fresh cells along with cocktail of numerous different type of supportive cells and growth factors neseccary for promtionf cell grwth.

Now a days enrichment of bone marrow derived stem cells can be done in the operating room with in 15 minutes with putting them into chemical stress and eliminating the risk of infection – called BMAC. BMAC has become popular of late.  In this procedure, a physician takes a bone marrow aspirate, places it in a specially designed centrifuge and pulls out a concentrate of bone marrow nucleated cells.