Review Article Cellular Kinetics of Perivascular MSC Precursors

Copyright © 2013 William C. W. Chen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs) and MSC-like multipotent stem/progenitor cells have been widely investigated for regenerativemedicine anddeemedpromising in clinical applications. In order to further improveMSC-based stemcell therapeutics, it is important to understand the cellular kinetics and functional roles ofMSCs in the dynamic regenerative processes. However, due to the heterogeneous nature of typical MSC cultures, their native identity and anatomical localization in the body have remained unclear, making it difficult to decipher the existence of distinct cell subsets within the MSC entity. Recent studies have shown that several blood-vessel-derived precursor cell populations, purified by flow cytometry frommultiple human organs, give rise to bon