Therapeutic potential of adipose-derived stromal cells in age-related osteoporosis.

Adipose-derived stromal cells (ASCs) are increasingly being used for orthopedic-based tissue engineering approaches due to their ability to readily undergo osteogenic differentiation. In the present study, we used in vitro and in vivo approaches to evaluate the use of ASCs as a treatment strategy for age-related osteoporosis. Molecular, histological and micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) based approaches confirmed that ASCs isolated from 18-week-old osteoporotic senescence-accelerated mice (SAMP6) were capable of undergoing osteogenesis when cultured in either silk fibroin (SF) scaffolds or scaffold-free microtissues (ASC-MT).