ABSTRACT
Research on BMSCs can be traced back to more than 130 years ago (Cohnheim, 1867), when Cohnheim injected an analine dye into the veins and found dye-labeled broblast-like cells in a distal wound site (Prockop, 1997). is observation suggested the presence of non-hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow. In the 1970s, Friedenstein noticed that a small population of cells obtained from bone marrow aspirates were able to attach to the bottom of plastic culture dish. e attached cells were heterogenous in appearance, but mainly consisted of spindle-shaped. Most importantly, they were capable of dierentiating to form small mineralized deposits resembling bone or cartilage (Friedenstein et al., 1976). Later, the same group demonstrated that these cells retained their potential to dierentiate into bone, cartilage, and brous tissue in vivo, even aer 20 or 30 cell doublings in culture (Friedenstein et al., 1987). Further studies conrmed this observation and proved that BMSCs were able to dierentiate into osteoblasts, chondroblasts, adipocytes, and myoblasts (Wakitani et al., 1995, Clark and Keating, 1995). Caplan was the rst to coin the term MSCs to describe these cells with multilineage dierentiation potential (Caplan, 1991). Other terms have also been used to describe the bone marrow-derived pluripotent cells, such as marrow-isolated adult multilineage inducible cells (D’Ippolito et al., 2004), very small embryonic-like cells (Kucia et al., 2006), multipotent adult progenitor cells (Belema-Bedada et al., 2008), and pre-MSC (Anjos-Afonso and Bonnet, 2007).
