Manufacturing New Gut Tissue to Treat GI Diseases

As many are plagued by symptoms of gastrointestinal disorders, including ulcers or Crohn's disease, a recent study shows that with today's medical advances, medicine and dietary changes may become a thing of the past.

According to researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), they're hoping that their recent studies can provide information regarding intestinal stem cells that they can coax into the development of different types of mature intestinal cells.

"Being able to produce a large inventory of intestinal stem cells could be incredibly useful for stem cell therapy, where the cells could be delivered to patients to treat diseases such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis," Jeffrey Karp, Ph.D., Division of Biomedical Engineering, BWH Department of Medicine, co-senior study author said, via a press release. "These cells could also be useful for pharmaceutical companies to screen and identify new drugs that could regulate diseases from inflammatory bowel disease, to diabetes, to obesity. However, to date there hasn't been a way to expand intestinal stem cell numbers.

Researchers note that "crypts" of the human gut are immature adult stem cells that live along with specialized cells known as Paneth cells. The stem cells remain in this state as long as they stay in contact with the Paneth group. However, when they are removed and replaced with two small molecules that involve cell signaling, the molecules can direct the stem cells and help them develop into pure populations of stem cells.

"This is an opportunity to generate a large number of relevant mature gastrointestinal cell types that was not possible before and enable high-throughput screening using these cell times," lead study author Xiaolei Yin, Ph.D., Center for Regenerative Therapeutics, BWH Department of medicine said, via the release.

Researchers hope that with more studies, this can help to replace damaged gut tissue that's responsible for the disease.

More information regarding the study can be found via the journal Nature Methods.