Bone Marrow Very Small Embryonic-Like Stem Cells: New Generation of Autologous Cell Therapy Soon Ready for Prime Time?

Very small embryonic-like stem cells (VSELs) are major pluripotent stem cells described in human and mouse. In this issue of Stem Cell Reviews and Reports, Shaikh and colleagues show in a valuable work that mouse bone marrow collected after 5FU treatment contains VSELs able to undergo in vitro multi-lineage differentiation into cells from all three germ layers and also in germ and hematopoietic cells. These findings are robust since no confounding factor such as feeder cell fusion with VSELs can occur here. This paper allows one to better appreciate bone marrow-VSELs differentiation potential and opens new perspectives for autologous cell therapy. Furthermore, it might help explaining lots of contradictive data from the past 20 years, in particular related to ability of bone marrow cells to differentiate into cardiomyocytes.