Correlation of in vivo bone formation capability and in vitro differentiation of human bone marrow stromal cells.

Although human bone marrow stromal cells (MSCs) have been used for clinical bone reconstruction, how the physiological status of patients and culture conditions of MSCs affect the result of bone reconstruction must be clarified to use MSCs in a clinical stage. If in vitro parameters of the status of MSCs may be correlate with in vivo bone formation capability, the better cells for clinical bone reconstruction can be defined by the parameters. In order to explore the parameters and define the optimum cells for clinical use, the proliferation and differentiation capabilities in vitro and the in vivo bone formation capability of MSCs were analyzed. An age-related proliferation capability was found. The in vitro alkaline phosphatase activity of bone formation finding groups was higher than that of the no bone formation group. This may be provide a parameter to obtain the optimum cells for clinical use to benefit improving the cure efficiency. In this study, it is preferable that MSCs of passage 1 have stronger osteogenic potential than those of passage 2 and 3 in vitro, and might be suitable for clinical application to bone tissue engineering.