The Importance Of Stem Cell

‘Stem cell’ – the term was first coined by Russian histologist Alexander Maksimov in 1908 to herald the existence of special cells those have capacity to generate blood cell. Stem cells are the core materials of regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. Although there are multiple types of stem cells available based on their origin and functionality; however, scientifically they can be classified into four well-defined classes– (1) embryonic stem cell (ESC), (2) adult stem cells (ASC) for example, muscle satellite cells are muscle-specific adult stem cell, (3) induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC), and (4) pathological stem cells (PSC) for example, cancer stem cells (CSC) [1]. Out of these 4 types, ESC and ASCs are true physiological stem cells, iPSCs are engineered stem cells and PSCs are conditional stem cells. Among them, ESC and iPSC are being considered true pluripotent stem cells, which have the capacity for unlimited self-renewal and differentiation into all the specialized cell types of the body. Therefore these cells have been considered the most favorable cells for using in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering [2,3,4,5,6,7,8].
Stem cells need special environment for their survival, maintenance and growth. During the early stage of establishing the culture methodologies for stem cells, it was realized that they need supports from other cells for example, mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF). Co-culture methodology with gamma-irradiated MEF cells used as feeder-cells and enriched culture media with fetal bovine serum (FBS) were successfully utilized for establishing in vitro stem cell culture [9,10]. However, using a second non-related cells (although growth restricted) are not suitable for using them for different...

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...ntroduced Fc-chimeric protein in stem cell technology approximately a decade ago, and over the years we and others have established multiple Fc-chimeric proteins as significantly favorable cell-recognizable biomaterials in stem cell technology. These works with variety of Fc-chimeric proteins spanning from ECM component protein (for example, ECad) to cytokine (for example, HGF) have shown tremendous potential to overcome the major barriers in stem cell technology namely, defined condition for stem cell culture, selective differentiation to the target lineages, convenient purification of the desired cells etc., for the application of stem cell technology targeting to regenerative medicine. In this article we will focus on ECad-Fc and NCad-Fc chimeric proteins as novel cell-recognizable biomaterials in stem cell technology towards application in regenerative medicine.