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Blood stem cells are rare cells in the bone marrow that produce the blood and immune cells needed throughout life, ensuring that the body's blood and immune system are renewed. This is why they are also used in bone marrow transplants and novel gene therapies for treating a range of blood disorders. However, during gene therapy, the stem cells need to be processed in the laboratory before transplantation, which can cause them to lose some of their regenerative capacity and reduce the chance of the overall treatment being successful.

To improve the prospects of these therapies, researchers from the Institute for Regenerative Medicine (IREM) at the University of Zurich were looking for new signaling pathways that could improve the function of blood stem cells.

To do this, they investigated how a protein called activated protein C (aPC) influences human blood stem cells. They compared the effect of aPC with that of thrombin—another protein that is involved in blood clotting and acts via the same cell receptor, known as protease-activated receptor 1 (PAR1).

The work, published in EMBO Molecular Medicine, was a collaborative effort between UZH and the University of California, Santa Cruz (Dr. Marcel Rommel and Professor Camilla Forsberg).

"Although both molecules activate the same receptor, PAR1, they produce very different outcomes," says first author Simon Pöllmann from the IREM.

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