Mesenchymal Stem Cells and Senescence

Review Article

Guijuan Feng, Wei Tan and Z

Abstract

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have the ability of self-renewal and differentiation into multiple tissues. The senescence of MSCs may involve some age related disease and autoimmune disease such as SLE. Senescent MSCs may limit MSCs clinical application. Thus, analysis of in vitro senescence in MSC is crucial for quality control of MSCs preparations used for therapeutic application. This review summarizes recent advances about main characteristics of senescent MSCs, molecular mechanisms and signal pathway of MSCs senescence. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have the ability of self-renewal and differentiation into multiple tissues. Unlike other stem cells, MSCs have characteristics of a low expression of major histocompatibility complex class I and the absence of co-stimulatory molecules such as CD80, CD86 or CD40. Therefore, there is no problem with tissue matching and immune rejection when transplantation of MSCs in treatment of certain autoimmune diseases. MSCs have some significant effects on immune modulation. MSCs modulate both innate and adaptive immunity, and such properties are promising use to clinical applications directly. Due to their unique biological and immunological properties, MSCs raise high hopes for cell-based clinical therapies and their use is concurrently tested in various clinical trials . MSCs-based therapies may be an interesting way for autoimmune diseases and inflammatory, as supported by approximately 3500 trials on adult stem cells. Recently, several research have demonstrated the efficacy of expanded MSCs infusion for diseases including Acute Graft Versus Host Disease (GVHD), osteoarthritis, Crohn’s disease, Liver diseases, Diabetes, Heart diseases, Limb ischemia, SLE and Neurological diseases . However, several factors influence the effective use of MSCs in clinical application, in particular by the relatively small yield of cells from adult tissues. Some studied showed that only ~2000 cells were isolated from one bone marrow aspirate at times and the number of MSCs is quite low for and infusion and cell-based clinical therapies. Therefore, the development of techniques to obtain a sufficient number of primary cells and the study for effective expansion were a prerequisite for MSCs therapeutic approaches.\r\n

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