Comment to: "Spontaneous transformation of adult mesenchymal stem cells from cynomolgus macaques in vitro" by Z. Ren et al. Exp. Cell Res. 317 (2011) 2950-2957. Spontaneous transformation of mesenchymal stem cells in culture: Facts or fiction?

Anja Torsvik*, Gro V. Røsland, Rolf Bjerkvig

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalEditorial

    8 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    There is at present a controversy in the literature whether MSCs are susceptible to spontaneous in vitro transformation or not. Several groups have reported spontaneous transformation of MSCs from various species. However, some of these reports were not true transformations and later proven to be due to cross-contaminating cancer cells. To date there is no solid evidence that MSCs can undergo spontaneous transformation in culture. Only two groups used DNA fingerprinting to authenticate their transformed cells, and both groups later showed cross-contamination of cancer cells in their cultures. In this commentary, we address the paper "Spontaneous transformation of adult mesenchymal stem cells from cynomolgus macaques in vitro" by Z. Ren et al. Exp. Cell Res. 317 (2011) 2950-2957. In this article the authors characterize the transformed mesenchymal cells (TMCs) and claim to have verified their origin. We question the authentication of the TMCs made by the authors and we also believe it is in the interest of the scientific community, that a highly controversial finding, such as spontaneous transformation of MSCs, should be properly verified by stringent methods, preferably DNA fingerprinting, in order to validate if an actual transformation event has occurred.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)441-443
    Number of pages3
    JournalExperimental Cell Research
    Volume318
    Issue number5
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 10 Mar 2012

    Keywords

    • Cross-contamination
    • DNA fingerprinting
    • Mesenchymal stem cells
    • STR analysis
    • Spontaneous transformation
    • Transformed mesenchymal cell

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