Capacity of human umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stem cells to differentiate into sweat gland-like cells: a preclinical study

Abstract

Human umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stem cells (hUC-MSCs) possess various advantageous properties, including self-renewal, extended proliferation potential, multi-lineage differentiation potential and capacity for differentiating into sweat gland-like cells in certain conditions. However, little is known about the effect of clinical-grade culture conditions on these properties and on the differentiative potential of hUC-MSCs. In this study, we sought to investigate the properties of hUC-MSCs expanded with animal serum free culture media (ASFCM) in order to determine their potential for differentiation into sweat gland-like cells. We found that primary cultures of hUC-MSCs could be established with ASFCM. Moreover, cells cultured in ASFCM showed vigorous proliferation comparable to those of cells grown in classical culture conditions containing fetal bovine serum (FBS). Morphology of hUC-MSCs cultured in ASFCM was comparable to those of cells grown under classical culture conditions, and hUC-MSCs grown in both of the two culture conditions tested showed the typical antigen profile of MSCs—positive for CD29, CD44, CD90, and CD105, and negative for CD34 and CD45, as expected. Chromosomal aberration assay revealed that the cells were stable after long-term culture under both culture conditions. Like normal cultured MSCs, hUC-MSCs induced under ASFCM conditions exhibited expression of the same markers (CEA, CK14 and CK19) and developmental genes (EDA and EDAR) that are characteristic of normal sweat gland cells. Taken together, our findings indicate that the classical culture medium used to differentiate hUC-MSCs into sweat gland-like cells can be replaced safely by ASFCM for clinical purposes.

Keywords

umbilical cord / mesenchymal stem cells / sweat gland / preclinical

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Acknowledgements

This paper was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 81121004 and 81230041) and the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program, 2012CB518105).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Siming Yang, Kui Ma, Changjiang Feng, Yan Wu, Yao Wang, Sha Huang and Xiaobing Fu declare that they have no competing financial interests.

Human umbilical cord and normal whole skin samples were received from patients at the First Affiliated Hospital of PLA General Hospital and were donated with the patients’ informed consent. The process was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board and Ethics Committee of the First Affiliated Hospital of PLA General Hospital.

Electronic supplementary material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11684-013-0282-2 and is accessible for authorized users.

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg