Aging puzzle: A closer look on the complex dilemma of autologous stem cell therapy

Table 1 Historical milestones of stem cell-based therapies[8,10-12]

Year	Discovery
1868	The earliest known use is by Ernst Haeckel (1868), referring to unicellular organisms as the origin of multicellularity[10]
1902	First description of hematopoietic progenitor cells by Franz Ernst Christian Neumann and Alexander A Maximov[12]
1939	First report of bone marrow transplantation for aplasmic anemia; first attempt failed
1957	Dr. E Donnall Thomas performed the first allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation
1958	First transplantation of stem cell for the treatment of radioactive exposure by George Mathe
1960s-1970s	Foundational works on stromal stem cells led by Friendenstein’s team
1972	The successful allogeneic transplants (first successful cases) for aplastic anemia
1981	The first murine ESCs were established by Evans and Kaufman and GR Martin
1991	Stromal stem cells were renamed as “Mesenchymal stem cells” by AI Caplan
1998	James Thomson isolated the first ESCs from human
2007	Discovery of iPSCs by Shinya Yamanaka and Kazutoshi Takahashi
2010	First clinical trial using ESC-derived OPC1 for the treatment of spinal cord injury conducted by Geron (NCT01217008)
2015	First case report of cardiac progenitors produced from human ESCs for severe heart disease
2017	First report of using iPSC-derived retinal cells in treatment of macular degeneration
2022	Reported 10 years follow up data on OPC1 administration for the treatment of spinal cord injury

ESC: Embryonic stem cell; iPSCs: Induced pluripotent stem cells.