We'll continue on with the next four speakers. The next speaker is Dr. Perez-Cruy, potential for human NP-like cells derived from umbilical cord to treat degenerative disc disease, novel mechanism for disc degeneration. Great. Thank you. Today, I'm going to present some of our research that we've been active in for the last 15 years. These are my disclosures. The nucleus pulposus and the disc itself have a very unique anatomy, which I feel is ideal for stem cell applications. It's a vascular, and we've shown that it's an immunoprivileged site. This is based on some of our previous research, and this builds on that research. The process of disc degeneration is very interesting. You can see in humans with the annular tear, the disc may just start to desiccate, and we've created the same model in a rabbit by puncturing the disc. We now are interested in looking at a human source of stem cells, so we picked the umbilical cord. We harvest from the umbilical cord both the mesenchymal stem cells, differentiate them into nucleus pulposus-like cells, label them, then create the disc degeneration in the rabbit by puncturing the disc and inject these cells and see if they're capable of regenerating the disc. We've developed a medium for differentiation of these cells from a mesenchymal stem cell into a nucleus pulposus-like cell, and we've labeled them and been very successful in doing that and seeing an increased expression of gene-related proteins that we typically see in the nucleus pulposus from the cells that we differentiate. We were then very successful in labeling these cells so that we could follow where they go in our model, and then we developed this model where we puncture the disc. Two weeks later, we inject either the mesenchymal stem cell, which is undifferentiated, or the differentiated nucleus pulposus cell, followed by eight weeks, we harvest the disc and analyze it. These are some of our live in vivo MRI images, and we found that the disc height was significant and almost equal to control in the nucleus pulposus cell-injected disc. These are MRIs showing the healthy MRI, puncture, puncture, showing two weeks later you start to see degeneration, control is in the middle, inject with nucleus pulposus cells, we're able to regenerate the disc seen on in vivo MRIs and the regular going on to degeneration of the punctured disc. We then did extensive analysis of the tissue, showing increase in nucleus pulposus. In the nucleus pulposus cell-injected disc, we saw increased nucleus pulposus percentage similar to control, water content and glucose amino content, GAD content similar to control, and the cellularity of the nucleus pulposus disc is similar to control, as well as the glucose amino glycan matrix production in the nucleus pulposus-injected disc is similar to control. When we look at the expression of proteins, this shows that the mesenchymal-injected cells express proteins but not as robust as in the nucleus pulposus cells. So the nucleus pulposus cell-injected disc were much more effective at generating, expressing those proteins that we see in the nucleus pulposus, and this simply shows that the amount of genes expressed are much higher in the nucleus pulposus genes, disc-injected with nucleus pulposus cells. We were able to generate a pathway, and this pathway led to the TGF-beta pathway for disc regeneration. The reason this is so important, because now we can start to see levels which could potentially lead to disc regeneration pharmacologically by altering some of these pathways. So in conclusion, the mesenchymal cells and the nucleus pulposus cells can improve some of the regeneration, but the nucleus pulposus-differentiated cells were much more effective at doing this. I'd like to thank our myriad of collaborators on this. This is a multi-institutional collaboration, and I'd like to just show this. Just injecting the cells might not be enough. This is some of our proprietary technology where we can look at potentially over time regenerating the height of the disc, and then followed by the injection of differentiated nucleus pulposus cells from the umbilical cord origin. Thank you very much. Thank you.

degenerative disc disease

stem cell applications

regenerative capabilities

TGF-beta pathway

collaborative research