What applies to meat, vegetables and fish may also apply to cells for use in cell therapy: frozen often isn’t quite as good.
Ian Copland and colleagues from Emory’s Personalized Immunotherapy Center have a paper this week in Stem Cells Reports discussing how freezing and thawing stem cells messes them up. Specifically, it disrupts their actin cytoskeletons and impairs their ability to find their niches in the body. Culturing the cells for 48 hours after thawing does seem to correct the problem, though.
The findings have some straightforward implications for researchers planning to test cell therapies in clinical applications. The authors conclude:
Until such time as a cryopreservation and thawing procedure can yield a viable and fully functional MSC product immediately after thawing, our data support the idea of using live MSCs rather than post-thaw cryo MSCs for clinical evaluation of MSCs as an immunosuppressive agent.
Notably, the Emory Personalized Immunotherapy Center has built a process designed around offering never-frozen autologous (that is, the patient’s own) mesenchymal stem cells, as therapies for autoimmune disorders such as Crohn’s disease.
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