STEM cells have been engineered to home in on damaged tissue by disguising them as immune cells.
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) from bone marrow have the potential to promote healing of damaged tissue. But their use has been hampered by the difficulty in getting enough of these cells to where they are needed.
Jeffrey Karp and colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston attached a molecule that is found on immune cells to MSCs. The molecule sticks to cells lining blood vessels at sites of injury and enables immune cells to move into tissue. When these altered MSCs were…
