A new way for therapeutic stem cells to exit the bloodstream

Tyler Allen, a graduate student in Dr. Ke Cheng’s laboratory at the Department of Biomedical Sciences discovered that stem cells can be actively expelled from the bloodstream by epithelial cells in the blood vessels. The process is called angiopellosis. Tyler and colleagues used transgenic zebrafish embryos whose blood vessel cells express gfp and injected them with cardiac stem cells labeled with a red fluorescent marker. The injected living embryos where then imaged over a period of one to several days in CMIF’s Lightsheet Z.1. The results were recently published in the journal Stem Cells.  Some of Tyler’s videos are featured on CMIF’s youtube channel.