灵长类干细胞在基础科学与应用研究中的机遇与展望

Chances and outlooks of primate stem cells in basic science and application

以干细胞治疗为核心的再生医学为人类退行性和损伤性的重大疾病治疗提供了希望。然而,干细胞应用于人之前,一些重大的科学问题和治疗的安全性、有效性还没有得到有效的回答和验证。由于啮齿类动物在遗传、代谢和生理表型等方面与人存在较大差异,因此其研究结果较难转化到人上。非人灵长类(NHP)与人高度相似,因此,利用NHP模型可以回答和解决啮齿类动物无法回答的问题,从而解决干细胞基础科学和再生医学技术瓶颈问题。该文首先总结了在NHP模型上需解决的干细胞重大科学问题和技术瓶颈,如干细胞的多能性、治疗的安全性和效率等。其次,评述了一些新技术的出现将加速灵长类干细胞研究和应用。结合NHP模型,这些技术将促进干细胞在基础科学和临床治疗中的应用研究。最后,建议将干细胞的先进技术应用于NHP模型,这将极大促进干细胞关键科学问题的回答和技术瓶颈的解决。

Stem cell therapy as the core of regenerative medicine provides hope for the treatment of major degenerative and injury diseases.However,major scientific issues and the safety and efficacy of treatment still remain to be verified before stem cells are translated to human beings.The study results based on rodents are very difficult to translate into human beings because of the large differences in genetic,metabolic,and physiological phenotypes between rodents and human.The high similarity between non-human primate(NHP)and human makes NHP an ideal model for answering these questions.Thus,NHP could be used as an important model to answer or solve some important scientific questions and technical difficulties in the stem cell field,which can’t be addressed with the rodent model,but are key to advance stem cell theories and promote its applications.In the review,we first summarized the major scientific issues and technical bottlenecks of stem cell studies that need to be addressed in the NHP model,including stem cell pluripotency and safety and efficiency of treatment.Then,we commented that the emergence of some new technologies will accelerate research and applications of primate stem cells,and outlooked that these new technologies will play important roles in basic science and clinical translation of NHP stem cells.Finally,we propose that the usage of advanced stem cell technologies combing with NHP models will significantly promote the resolution of key scientific questions and technological bottlenecks in stem cells.