Department of Biomedical Sciences and Program in Neuroscience, Florida State University College of Medicine, Tallahassee, FL, USA.
Histol Histopathol. 2012 Oct;27(10):1255-61. doi: 10.14670/HH-27.1255.
In recent years, stem cell-mediated therapies have gained considerable ground as potential treatments for a wide variety of brain pathologies including traumatic brain injury, stroke and neurodegenerative diseases. Despite extensive preclinical studies, many of these therapies have not been fully translated into viable clinical approaches. This is partly due to our inability to reliably track and monitor transplanted stem cells longitudinally over long periods of time in vivo. In this review, we discuss the predominant histological cell tracing methodologies, such as immunohistochemistry, and fluorescent cellular dyes and proteins, and compare them to emerging cellular imaging technologies. We show that advances in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have resulted in opportunities to use this technology to further our understanding of stem cell characteristics and behaviors in vivo. While MRI may not completely replace conventional cell tracking methods in pre-clinical, mechanistic work, it is clear that it has the potential to function as a powerful diagnostic tool for tracking stem cell migration and survival as well as for evaluating the efficacy of stem cell-mediated therapies.
近年来，干细胞介导的疗法作为治疗多种脑病理学的潜在方法得到了广泛的关注，包括创伤性脑损伤、中风和神经退行性疾病。尽管进行了广泛的临床前研究，但这些疗法中的许多仍未完全转化为可行的临床方法。这部分是由于我们无法在体内长时间可靠地跟踪和监测移植的干细胞。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了主要的组织学细胞示踪方法，如免疫组织化学和荧光细胞染料和蛋白，并将它们与新兴的细胞成像技术进行了比较。我们表明，磁共振成像 (MRI) 的进步为利用该技术来进一步了解体内干细胞的特征和行为提供了机会。虽然 MRI 可能不会完全取代临床前、机制研究中的传统细胞跟踪方法，但很明显，它有可能成为一种强大的诊断工具，用于跟踪干细胞的迁移和存活，以及评估干细胞介导的疗法的疗效。
