Your increased risk of fractures is a huge wellness concern when you have osteoporosis, but thanks to a discovery by researchers from the University Of Pennsylvania School Of Veterinary Medicine, the wellbeing of both humans and animals could be improved with fast bone fracture healing and other treatments.
As a result of their study, which was published in the journal Stem Cells, researchers found that a protein called Jagged-1 stimulates human stem cells to differentiate into bone-producing cells. Not only could this help you, and your pet, to heal from bone fractures faster, but this finding could also help to form the basis of treatments for a rare metabolic condition called Alagille syndrome.
Three members of Penn Vet’s departments of Clinical Studies-New Bolton Centre and Animal Biology authored the study: postdoctoral researchers Fengchang Zhu and Mariya T. Sweetwyne and associate professor Kurt Hankenson, who also holds the Dean W. Richardson Chair in Equine Disease Research. On the promise of these and other findings, Hankenson and his former doctoral student Mike Dishowitz launched a company, Skelegen, in November. The focus of this company, launched through Penn’s Centre for Technology Transfer UPstart programme, is to continue to develop and improve ways to deliver Jagged-1 to sites that require new bone growth.
You may think that human bones seem static and permanent, but actually your bone tissue forms and reforms throughout your life. Your osteoblast cells derive from the precursor cells known as mesenchymal stem cells, which are stored in bone marrow, and these osteoblasts form bone. However your body needs to send specific signals to these stem cells before they can become osteoblasts, and can get them from a molecule called bone morphogenic protein, which means that BMP has been used clinically to help patients healing from broken bones or to perform spinal fusions without relying on patients’ own bone tissue.
‘But it has become clear that BMPs have some issues with safety and efficacy,’ Hankenson explained. ‘In the field we’re always searching for new ways for progenitor cells to become osteoblasts so we became interested in the Notch signaling pathway.’ The researchers introduced Jagged-1, the Notch receptor, to human stem cells, and ‘it was remarkable to find that just putting the cells onto the Jagged-1 ligand seemed sufficient for driving the formation of bone-producing cells,’ Hankenson said.
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