HeMOToX

TRANS-HSC: Characterized Configured Human hematopoietic stem cell type of adult primary and progenitors

Any drug, compound agent or perturbation, (drug, environmental agent or xenobiotic, food addition, cosmetic addition, fuel addition, radiation or other exposure perturbation), has the potential to affect the normal steady state functioning and regulation of the blood-forming or hematopoietic system.
The hematopoietic system, like most biological systems in the body, is a stem cell system. The hematopoietic system is unique, however, in that it has the potential to produce multiple cell types, each with different functions, from a single stem cell. For all biological systems, the stem cell, or rather the stem cell compartment, which contains many different stages of stem cell primitiveness or maturity, is the foundation upon which all biological systems are built.
Damage to the stem cell compartment, or any part of it, can mean damage to the biological system and the organism as a whole. Stem cell hematotoxicity refers to damage to the stem cell compartment that affects the rest of the lympho-hematopoietic system, its organization, regulation and feedback mechanisms that are required to maintain a steady state condition.

Bone marrow toxicity, which is often referred to as myelotoxicity, means toxicological damage to one or more parts of the lympho-hematopoietic systems and microenvironmental system that supports it.
From the viewpoint of toxicology, hematotoxicity and immunotoxicity are inseparable, since common stem cells give rise to both systems and, if these are damaged, both systems will be affected. It is for this reason why detecting the response of stem cells to potentially toxic agents can provide predictive information for the rest of the lympho-hematopoietic system.

Conventional pathology to detect toxicity to the bone marrow and other hematopoietic tissues during pre-clinical animal testing does not provide the predictive insight of advanced in vitro toxicity testing platforms like that of HeMOToX.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the European Center for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM) published several articles on using the colony-forming cell (CFC) assay to predict drug-induced myelosuppression. The studies were initially focused on the myelomonocytic (granulocyte-macrophage) lineage and later the megakaryocytic lineage.

CFC assay does quantitatively measure cell proliferation, but also determines the ability of the cells to differentiate. The CFC assay is whole dependent upon the cells in the colony being able to differentiate and mature so that the colonies can be identified as belonging to one or another hematopoietic lineage. In this way, the possibility of an agent causing neutropenia can be differentiated from that causing anemia or thrombocytopenia.