Researchers turn fat into commodity

  PATIL ARMENIAN/Daily Bruin Senior Staff UCLA researcher
Patricia A. Zuk examines a container of fat
harvested from liposuction.

By Kiyoshi Tomono
Daily Bruin Contributor

The fat eventually placed in the trash at Beverly Hills’
liposuction clinics has become the treasure for a team of UCLA and
University of Pittsburgh researchers studying tissue
engineering.

Using fat sucked from the hips, thighs and buttocks of the rich
and famous, researchers have developed a technique to practically
and economically isolate stem cells, which may be used to grow a
variety of human tissues.

“The plastic surgeons have the patients sign a rigorous
informed consent form drafted at UCLA. But, most of the fat comes
from Beverly Hills ““ there’s a lot of lipo
there,” said Patricia A. Zuk, a post-doctorate researcher in
the UCLA Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. “Fat
isn’t bad like people think.”

Zuk, along with UCLA Plastic and Reconstructive surgery
researcher Dr. Min Zhu, co-authored a paper highlighting the
technique to be published in the April edition of the peer-reviewed
journal Tissue Engineering.

The technique allows a large number of stem cells to be
collected at one time. Stems cells, which are immature cells still
without a specific function, can be manipulated by researchers to
create tissues used to treat humans.

Already, the team has had some success in transforming the stem
cells into bone and cartilage cells.

“We’ve already been able to differentiate these
cells to bone cells, which are making a matrix that is known to be
the last step in bone formation,” Zuk said.

In addition to its implications in being able to engineer human
tissue, the technique may also make obsolete the controversial,
commonly-used procedure of harvesting stem cells from
fetal-tissue.

“We don’t yet know the limits for stem cells found
in fat. So far, we have seen promising results with all of the
tissue types we have examined,” said University of Pittsburgh
researcher Dr. Adam J. Katz in a statement. “This discovery
potentially could obviate the need for using fetal
tissue.”

Within five years, this technique may be used to grow actual
tissues on structures known as scaffolds in the lab. The tissues
may be used to repair and replace structures that are damaged or
missing in patients, such as the depletion of bone tissue caused by
osteoporosis.

“In the future, we may be able to take your fat tissue,
turn it into different tissue, and then reimplant it,” said
Dr. Mark Hedrick, the primary investigator for the UCLA Plastic and
Reconstructive research team.

“The risks are relatively small with this tissue because
they are your cells; they won’t be rejected like an organ,
and there are so many of these cells that they are easy to
obtain,” he said.

The technique is the first to be developed using fat tissue as a
source of stem cells. Previously, researchers used bone marrow
samples to extract the cells.

“This fat deal is really novel, but we’ve been
getting stem cells from other organs and bone marrow for a couple
of decades, almost 25 years,” Hedrick said.

In addition, researchers found that certain properties of the
fat tissues obtained through liposuction groomed them for isolating
stem cells.

“In fat tissue, we get a high ratio of stem cells ““
maybe one hundred times the amount we usually get from bone
marrow,” Zhu said.

“In the future, we may be able to take stem cells from
younger patients and save them so when they’re older, we can
give it to them.”