Clinical potential
from Section 2 - Fetal disease
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Introduction
Over the past decades fetal medicine with fetal therapy has evolved as a new field within obstetrics. Different treatment strategies have been explored and one of those is fetal stem cell transplantation. The rational for in-utero stem cell transplantation is based on the assumptions that treatment before birth is preferable because the target disease is either lethal for the fetus or will result in early childhood morbidity, making postnatal therapy less efficacious. In-utero stem cell transplantation should potentially represent a major step forward in the management of patients with congenital, hematological, metabolic, and immunological disorders. Traditionally the early first and second trimester fetus has been described as preimmune, i.e., incapable of mounting an adaptive immune response to allogeneic cells or pathogens. The concept of in-utero transplantations (IUTs) aims to take advantage of the naïve immunological system, and consequently transplantations could potentially be carried out across histoincompatibility barriers and with no need for immunomodulation or cytoablation.
The human fetus was subjected to treatment attempts with stem cell transplantation in 1989 when Touraine et al. published their first case [1] of IUT in a human fetus affected by bare lymphocyte syndrome. Since then we know of several X-severe combined immunodeficiency disease (SCID) cases treated in utero with stem cells [2–4]. All these children survived and were chimeric at birth.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.