broken bones

Them bones them bones them dry bones – and how to help repair them

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

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Broken bones

People say that with age comes wisdom, kindness and confidence. What they usually don’t say is that it also comes with aches and pains and problems we didn’t have when we were younger. For example, as we get older our bones get thinner and more likely to break and less likely to heal properly.

That’s a depressing opening paragraph isn’t it. But don’t worry, things get better from here because new research from Germany has found clues as to what causes our bones to become more brittle, and what we can do to try and stop that.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and CECAD Cluster of Excellence for Ageing Research at the University of Cologne have identified changes in stem cells from our bone marrow that seem to play a key role in bones getting weaker as we age.

To explain this we’re going to have to go into the science a little, so bear with me. One of the issues the researchers focused on is the role of epigenetics, this is genetic information that doesn’t change the genes themselves but does change their activity. Think of it like a light switch. The switch doesn’t change the bulb, but it does control when it’s on and when it’s off. So this team looked at the epigenome of MSCs, the stem cells found in the bone marrow. These cells play a key role in the creation of cartilage, bone and fat cells.

In a news release, Dr. Andromachi Pouikli, one of the lead researchers in the study, says these MSCs don’t function as well as we get older.

“We wanted to know why these stem cells produce less material for the development and maintenance of bones as we age, causing more and more fat to accumulate in the bone marrow. To do this, we compared the epigenome of stem cells from young and old mice. We could see that the epigenome changes significantly with age. Genes that are important for bone production are particularly affected.”

So, they took some stem cells from the bone marrow of mice and tested them with a solution of sodium acetate. Now sodium acetate has a lot of uses, including being used in heating pads, hand warmers and as a food seasoning, but in this case the solution was able to make it easier for enzymes to get access to genes and boost their activity.

“This treatment impressively caused the epigenome to rejuvenate, improving stem cell activity and leading to higher production of bone cells,” Pouikli said.

So far so good. But does this work the same way in people? Maybe so. The team analyzed MSCs from people who had undergone hip surgery and found that they showed the same kind of age-related changes as the cells from mice.

Clearly there’s a lot more work to do before we can even think about using this finding as a solution to aging bones. But it’s an encouraging start.

The study is published in the journal Nature Aging.

Stories that Caught Our Eye: New ways to heal old bones; and keeping track of cells once they are inside you

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broken bones

How Youth Factor Can Help Repair Old Bones

As we get older things that used to heal quickly tend to take a little longer to get better. In some cases, a lot longer. Take bones for example. A fracture in someone who is in their 70’s often doesn’t heal as quickly, or completely, as in someone much younger. For years researchers have been working on ways to change that. Now we may be one step closer to doing just that.

We know that using blood stem cells can help speed up healing for bone fractures (CIRM is funding work on that) and now researchers at Duke Health believe they have figured out how that works.

The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, identifies what the Duke team call the “youth factor” inside bone marrow stem cells. It’s a type of white blood cell called a macrophage. They say the proteins these macrophages produce help stimulate bone repair.

In a news story in Medicine News Line  Benjamin Alman, senior author on the study, says:

“While macrophages are known to play a role in repair and regeneration, prior studies do not identify secreted factors responsible for the effect. Here we show that young macrophage cells play a role in the rejuvenation process, and injection of one of the factors produced by the young cells into a fracture in old mice rejuvenates the pace of repair. This suggests a new therapeutic approach to fracture rejuvenation.”

Next step, testing this in people.

A new way to track stem cells in the body

It’s one thing to transplant stem cells into a person’s body. It’s another to know that they are going to go where you want them to and do what you want them to. University of Washington researchers have invented a device that doesn’t just track where the cells end up, but also what happens to them along the way.

The device is called “CellTagging”, and in an article in Health Medicine Network, Samantha Morris, one of the lead researchers says this could help in better understanding how to use stem cells to grow replacement tissues and organs.

“There is a lot of interest in the potential of regenerative medicine — growing tissues and organs in labs — to test new drugs, for example, or for transplants one day. But we need to understand how the reprogramming process works. We want to know if the process for converting skin cells to heart cells is the same as for liver cells or brain cells. What are the special conditions necessary to turn one cell type into any other cell type? We designed this tool to help answer these questions.”

In the study, published in the journal Nature, the researchers explain how they use a virus to insert tiny DNA “barcodes” into cells and that as the cells travel through the body they are able to track them.

Morris says this could help scientists better understand the conditions needed to more effectively program cells to do what we want them to.

“Right now, cell reprogramming is really inefficient. When you take one cell population, such as skin cells, and turn it into a different cell population — say intestinal cells — only about 1 percent of cells successfully reprogram. And because it’s such a rare event, scientists have thought it is likely to be a random process — there is some correct set of steps that a few cells randomly hit upon. We found the exact opposite. Our technology lets us see that if a cell starts down the right path to reprogramming very early in the process, all of its related sibling cells and their descendants are on the same page, doing the same thing.”