New way to extract bone-making cells from fat tissue

Scientists have developed a new method for extracting a wide variety of potential bone-producing cells from human fat.
Within our fat lives a variety of cells with the potential to become bone, cartilage, or more fat if properly prompted, researchers said.
This makes adipose tissue, in theory, a readily available reservoir for regenerative therapies such as bone healing if doctors can get enough of those cells and compel them to produce bone.
Scientists at Brown University have now developed a fluorescent tag that could find and identify cells expressing a gene called ALPL. Expression of the gene is an indicator of bone-making potential.

If the tag finds the RNA produced when the gene is expressed, it latches on and glows. A machine that detects the fluorescing light then separates out the ALPL-expressing cells.
The method produced more than twice the yield of potential bone-makers (9 per cent) compared to the best application of another method: sorting cells based on surface proteins presumed to indicate that a cell is a stem cell (4 per cent), researchers said.

The ALPL-expressing cells produced on average more than twice as much bone matrix (and as much as nine times more in some trials) during three weeks of subsequent cultivation than a similar-sized population of unsorted adipose tissue cells and almost four times more bone matrix than cells that don't express ALPL.

ALPL-expressing cells were also better at making cartilage or fat.
The study is published in the journal Stem Cell Research & Therapy.