Prospects for regeneration of gastrointestinal epithelia using bone-marrow cells

One of the recent challenges in regenerative medicine is to reconstitute damaged human tissues using the pluripotency of adult-tissue-derived cells. We propose the new concept that bone-marrow-derived cells could promote the regeneration of damaged epithelia in the human gastrointestinal (GI) tract. In bone-marrow transplant (BMT) recipients, epithelial cells of donor origin were distributed throughout the GI tract. Furthermore, these cells substantially repopulated the GI tract of BMT recipients during epithelial regeneration after graft-versus-host disease or ulcer formation. These findings might lead to a novel therapy for the repair of damaged intestinal epithelia using the pluripotency of bone-marrow cells, and could provide an alternative therapy for refractory inflammatory bowel diseases.