**Stem Cells in Disease**

**Chapter 7**

**Stem Cell-Based (Auto)Grafting: From Innovative**

Bela Balint, Slobodan Obradovic, Milena Todorovic,

Mirjana Pavlovic and Biljana Mihaljevic

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/54473

"therapeutic neovascularization" [1– 5].

unrelated SC donor is not obtainable [9–12].

**1. Introduction**

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

**Research Toward Clinical Use in Regenerative Medicine**

In brief, adult stem cells (SCs) give rise to repopulation (engraftment) of recipient's bone marrow (BM) followed by complete and long-term reconstitution of hematopoiesis. In addition, totipotent SCs are also capable of colonizing different tissues (homing). Initial studies showed that "implantation" of autologous SCs into damaged and ischemic area induces their homing and subsequent "transdifferentiation" into the cell lineages of host organ, including collateral vessel formation. Angiogenesis growth factors – or genes en‐ coding these proteins – promote the development of collateral micro-angiogenesis or

Generally, SC transplant involves the administration of high-dose chemotherapy (condition‐ ing regimen) and (re)infusion of collected cells in order to obtain an abolition of disease, as well as to get hematopoietic reconstitution and clinical improvement of patient. SC transplant with reduced-intensity conditioning (RIC) can be offered to patients who are ineligible for high-dose conditioning because of their age or comorbidities [2]. Hematological diseases have so far been the most common indication of this treatment modality; it has been less often used for nonmalignant disorders. Nowadays BM and peripheral blood (PB) derived SC transplants are more common in adult allogeneic or autologous setting [2, 6– 8]. Umbilical cord blood (UCB) transplants have provided hopeful results in pediatric setting mainly when a matched

In clinical practice, SCs can be collected by: (a) multiple aspirations from BM; (b) harvesting PB after mobilization with chemotherapy and/or growth factors (rHuG-CSF), and (c) by specific processing from UCB. SCs collected from the stated sources can be clinically applied

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© 2013 Balint et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

© 2013 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
