Towards the development of potency assays and 3D  inflammation models to evaluate the regenerative potential of  Mesenchymal Stem/Stromal Cell (MSC) and MSC-derived products

Raquel Medina dos Santos Cunha

Key information

Authors:

Raquel Medina dos Santos Cunha (Raquel Medina dos Santos Cunha)

Supervisors:

Cláudia Alexandra Martins Lobato da Silva (Cláudia Lobato da Silva); António José Calhabrês Fiarresga; Jeffrey Michael Karp

Published in

11/20/2018

Abstract

Mesenchymal stem/stromal cell (MSC) therapy is a promising cell-based therapy for inflammation-related diseases as cardiovascular and lung diseases. Several of these diseases do not have much treatment options rather than organ transplantation, which has limited availability and is associated with risk of infections and rejection. There is great interest on MSC therapies because MSCs are immune-privileged enabling their use as allogeneic therapy; have immunomodulatory properties, recruiting immune cells to the injury site to promote repair and suppressing immune cells to resolve inflammation; have supportive function and ability to secrete prosurvival, anti-apoptotic, angiogenic, anti-fibrotic and anti-scarring factors, thus, by cell contact and paracrine action MSCs promote regeneration of injured tissues. Nevertheless, clinical benefits are limited, the mechanisms of action are not fully understood and there is no standardization of the potency assays used to assess the regenerative properties of MSCs and MSC-derived products, conditioned medium (CM) and extracellular vesicles (EVs). Moreover, there is still no consensus on which cell source would have enhanced regenerative properties for specific applications and what would be the optimal dose range of MSCs, MSC-CM or MSC-EVs.