Cell therapy (CT) is a treatment method that repairs body tissues or cells by injecting or implanting living cells into the patient's body. It originated in the 19th century when Charles-Edward Brown-Séquard used animal testicular extracts to reduce the effects of aging and caused a sensation at the end of the 19th century. The first successful case of cell therapy (CT) was the application of bone marrow transplantation, which also laid the foundation for bone marrow transplantation, making it the most mature cell therapy so far. It then expands to treat various organs and diseases, such as cancer, brain tissue, heart, and joints. Recently, mesenchymal stem cell therapy has been derived to respond to COVID-19, which is expected to repair pulmonary fibrosis caused by infection.

Cell therapy (CT) can be separated into autologous cells, allogeneic cells, and xenogeneic cells according to the treatment plan. The following explains the difference for you:

Autologous cells:

stromal cells taken from the patient's own tissues and transplanted to the site to be treated or repaired. The advantage of autologous cells is that the cells are taken from the patient and are unlikely to cause rejection. But the treatment fee is probably too high.

Allogeneic cells:

The cell donor and recipient are different people, and rejection may occur. However, if various difficulties are overcome, it becomes the most effective method of medicine.

Heterogeneous cells:

Cells from different species. The current bottleneck is overcoming rejection and the different tissue aging rate between animals and humans.

Cell selection for cell therapy

For different disease treatments or tissue repairs, the cell types selected may be different. At present, the most common are immune cells, stem cells, or progenitor cells.

Among them, stem cells have the ability to regenerate, proliferate and differentiate, making them have very wide application potential in cell therapy, and can be used to repair tissues and treat diseases. Studies have shown that it can be used for diabetes, Parkinson's disease, heart disease, spinal cord injury, and cancer. However, stem cells may also derive other safety issues due to their strong differentiation ability, such as differentiation into tumors to trigger immune rejection. The more famous and successful stem cell transplantation treatment is blood cancer (leukemia)

In recent years, the most popular cell therapy is immunotherapy. The immunotherapy system extracts the patient's blood, separates immune cells from the blood, cultivates, reproduces, or attaches tumor antigens, and then implants them into the patient's body. This can strengthen the patient's immunity and kill cancer cells. Such as chimeric antigen receptor T cells (CAR-T), NK killer cells, DC dendritic cells... etc.

During cell therapy, biological buffers are sometimes used to separate cells for culture. Learn more about the biological buffers used in cell therapy:

Further Reading: The biological buffers used in cell therapy

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