Local Anesthetics Can Affect the Efficacy of Telomerase-Positive Stem Cells

Abstract

Early clinical studies with telomerase-positive stem cells demonstrated no response when these stem cells were mixed with lidocaine prior to clinical treatments in multiple individuals. Their stem cells demonstrated a positive response when mixed with normal sterile saline utilizing alternative routes of implantation. We hypothesized that lidocaine killed the stem cells before injection and that dead stem cells would give no response. We tested five local anesthetics, e.g., bupivacaine, lidocaine, marcaine, novocaine and procaine, with sterile saline in a series of blinded experiments to determine their ability to affect the viability of telomerase-positive stem cells. A mixture of TSCs, PSCs and MesoSCs were utilized from five individuals, three males and two females. Trypan blue was used to distinguish live versus dead PSCs and MesoSCs. The number of dead cells divided by total number of cells and multiplied by 100 was used for each test solution to determine their respective % kill ratio. Sample size was n=180 for each test solution. Lidocaine demonstrated a 100% kill ratio; novocaine and procaine demonstrated a 50% kill ratio and marcaine, bupivacaine and sterile saline demonstrated a 0% kill ratio. The