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Healthcare: First telocytes transplant in Romania conducted at Victor Babes Institute
The first telocytes transplant in Romania has been recently conducted at the Victor Babes Institute of Bucharest by a team led by Ph.D. Laurentiu Popescu. It was performed on a lab animal that had been induced a myocardial infarction. The first was unveiled at an on-going international congress in Bucharest that discusses organ regeneration.
'This transplant is a relatively simple procedure on a heart that already suffered an experimental myocardial infarction. Through surgery, a well-defined number of telocytes was transplanted. The telocytes were delivered to the affected tissue. We are extending our research on a larger time interval. This procedure will continue, because we want to demonstrate the functional characteristics of this new cell type. We hope these will help limit the destructive effects of infraction on the myocardium. Preliminary data indicate that the number of cells marked beforehand arrived there where it was delivered through transplantation,' medical geneticist Gabriel Manole explains.
He says this is a multi-staged process. A next stage is establishing how the two types of cells - stem cells and telocytes - interact.
'Everything starts from a recent conviction that the ‘stem cell' is dogmatically approached; there is a dogmatic thinking about it, in that stem cells can solve the regeneration and repair of tissues. If we see stem cells as a medication, than they will have to be as pure as possible if they are to yield results. Stem cells are highly complex cells; they exist in the bodies of all humans, but they exist in micro-environments in the human body, which is the product of several factors, including the telocytes, which surround with their arms the stem cell to protect them and also to teach them what to do. And so out hypothesis, which seems to get experimental backing, is that in order to regenerate tissues and orphans we would better use a stem-telocytes tandem, a double cellular representation instead of pure stem cells. We are about to achieve that,' Popescu detailed.
The first experimental telocytes transplantation was performed in 2012 in Chinua.
Today and tomorrow, an international symposium on telocytes, the discovery of a research team of the Victor Babes Institute headed by Ph.D. Popescu, is held in Bucharest. Attending the event is also the head of the Chinese specialist team that performed the world's first experimental telocytes transplant, professor DQCai, Director of the Key Laboratory for Regenerative Medicine of the Ji Nan University of Canton, China.
Also attending are scientists form Japan, Canada, Germany, Italy, the UK, Belgium, Denmark, Spain and Serbia.