Regenerative medicine

Recently, a major breakthrough in the development of animal models for cell therapy and cell-based gene therapy has been accomplished in our laboratory.

To further explore the therapeutic potential of regenerative treatment protocols, it is necessary to trace the fate of individual donor or manipulated cells in the host organism. However, immune-mediated rejection of labeled cells is a general problem in transplantation studies using cells labeled with any immunogenic marker, and also in gene therapy protocols. By inducing specific tolerance to a marker gene, we were able to establish a syngeneic rat model for long-term histological cell tracking in the absence of immune-mediated rejection of labeled cells in immunocompetent animals (Odörfer et al. BMC Biotechnology 7:30, 2007).

In addition, we found that the genetic marker human placental alkaline phosphatase provides superb histological detection quality in hard and soft tissues, because the enzyme survives not only paraffin but also methylmethacrylate embedding (Unger et al. Histochem Cell Biol 127:669 - 674, 2007).

The combination of both findings permits investigation of the efficacy and safety of cell-based therapeutic approaches in an unprecedented way. We are currently focusing on regenerative therapy of osteoarthritis and of myocardial infarction, and on the development of novel marker tolerant animal models in this research area.

Research overview