The bone marrow, or in other words the mother place of many types of stem cells, is known to be a soft, gelatinous tissue that fills the centers of bones. There are two distinctive types of bone marrow: Red bone marrow and Yellow bone marrow.
The bone marrow contains not only hematopoietic stem cells but also a variety of other heterogeneous populations of non-hematopoietic stem cells. These non-hematopoietic stem cells have been expressed in the literature as:
The therapeutic potential of mesenchymal stem cells
As explained by Friedenstein (1966), MSCs are multipotent cells that are the main focus of research efforts to explore their potential for treating a variety of diseases. First as a paradigm for skeletal tissue regeneration, MSCs also have an important role to modulate endogenous tissue and immune cells. As they seem to have an immune-evasive nature, MSCs are likely to release immunomodulatory factors which will allow them to escape rejection mechanisms for an adequate time to utilize their therapeutic action.
Autograft Versus Allograft Therapy
In 2002, a prospective, randomized clinical study was conducted on 99 patients with a symptomatic Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) deficient knee to assess the long-term results of ACL reconstruction by using either an allograft or autograft. After ACL reconstruction in a young athletic population with a minimum of 10-year follow-up, approximately 80% of all grafts were intact and stable. Yet, patients who had an allograft failed at a rate over 3 times higher than those with an autograft.
