The endometrium is a dynamic tissue that undergoes cyclic changes in response to ovarian hormones during the menstrual cycle. These changes are crucial for pregnancy establishment and maintenance. Endometrial stem cells play a pivotal role in endometrial regeneration and repair by differentiating into various cell types within the endometrium. However, their involvement in...
Dental implants are widely used to replace missing teeth, providing patients with unparalleled levels of effectiveness, convenience, and affordability. The biological basis for the clinical success of dental implants is osseointegration. Bone aging is a high-risk factor for the reduced osseointegration and survival rates of dental implants. In aged individuals, mesenchymal stem...
There are currently no effective clinical therapies to ameliorate the loss of function that occurs after spinal cord injury. Electrical stimulation of the rat spinal cord through the rat tail has previously been described by our laboratory. We propose combinatorial treatment with human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived spinal neural progenitor cells (sNPCs) along with tail...
A 45,X monosomy (Turner syndrome, TS) is the only chromosome haploinsufficiency compatible with life. Nevertheless, the surviving TS patients still suffer from increased morbidity and mortality, with around one-third of them subjecting to heart abnormalities. How loss of one X chromosome drive these conditions remains largely unknown. Here, we have generated cardiomyocytes (CMs...
With the continuous improvement of human technology, the medical field has gradually moved from molecular therapy to cellular therapy. As a safe and effective therapeutic tool, cell therapy has successfully created a research boom in the modern medical field. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are derived from early mesoderm and have high self-renewal and multidirectional...
Heart failure (HF) is a major cause of death worldwide. The most effective treatment for HF is heart transplantation, but its use is limited by the scarcity of donor hearts. Recently, stem cell-based therapy has emerged as a promising approach for treating myocardial infarction. Our research group has been investigating the use of human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived...
Interstitial lung diseases (ILD) are a group of rare lung diseases with severe outcomes. The COST Innovator Grant aims to establish a first-of-a-kind open-access Biorepository of patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) and to train researchers in the skills required to generate a robust preclinical model of ILD using these cells. This study aims to describe and...
Recent studies demonstrated that elevated osmolarity could induce adipocyte dedifferentiation, representing an appealing procedure to generate multipotent stem cells. Here we aim to elucidate the molecular mechanisms that underlie osmotic induction of adipocyte reprogramming. To induce dedifferentiation, the 3T3-L1 or SVF adipocytes were cultured under the hypertonic pressure in...
Three-dimensional (3D) cell culture is widely used in various fields of cell biology. In comparison to conventional two-dimensional (2D) cell culture, 3D cell culture facilitates a more accurate replication of the in vivo microenvironment, which is essential for obtaining more relevant results. The application of 3D cell culture techniques in regenerative medicine, particularly...
Autoimmune hepatitis is a chronic inflammatory hepatic disorder with no effective treatment. Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) have emerged as a promising treatment owing to their unique advantages. However, their heterogeneity is hampering use in clinical applications. Wharton’s jelly derived MSCs (WJ-MSCs) were isolated from 58 human donors using current good manufacturing...
Morbidity and mortality associated with cardiovascular diseases, such as myocardial infarction, stem from the inability of terminally differentiated cardiomyocytes to regenerate, and thus repair the damaged myocardial tissue structure. The molecular biological mechanisms behind the lack of regenerative capacity for those cardiomyocytes remains to be fully elucidated. Recent...
Systemic sclerosis (SSc) and sclerodermatous graft-versus-host disease (Scl-GVHD)—characterized by similar developmental fibrosis, vascular abnormalities, and innate and adaptive immune response, resulting in severe skin fibrosis at the late stage—are chronic autoimmune diseases of connective tissue. The significant immune system dysfunction, distinguishing autoimmune-related...
The meta-analysis by Wang et al. (Stem Cell Res Ther 14(1):103, 2023) aims to explore whether mesenchymal stem cells are effective for perianal fistulas. The authors indicated that the difference in cell types, cell sources and cell dosages did not influence mesenchymal stem cells’ efficacy, which may not be accurate. I think that local treatment with higher dosages of...
Induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cell therapies are an interesting new area in the field of regenerative medicine. One of the approaches to decrease the costs of iPSC-derived therapies is the use of allogenic homozygous human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-matched donors to generate iPSC lines and to build a clinical-grade iPSC bank covering a high percentage of the Spanish...
Human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes (CMs) hold great promise for cardiac disease modelling, drug discovery and regenerative medicine. Despite the advancement in various differentiation protocols, the heterogeneity of the generated population composed of diverse cardiac subtypes poses a significant challenge to their practical applications. Mixed populations...
Limbal stem cells (LSCs) are crucial for the regeneration of the corneal epithelium in patients with limbal stem cell deficiency (LSCD). Thus, LSCs during cultivation in vitro should be in highly homogeneous amounts, while potency and expression of stemness without tumorigenesis would be desirable. Therefore, further characterization and safety evaluation of engineered limbal...
Allergic airway inflammation is prevalent worldwide and imposes a considerable burden on both society and affected individuals. This study aimed to investigate the therapeutic advantages of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) overexpressed interleukin-10 (IL-10) for the treatment of allergic airway inflammation, as both IL-10 and MSCs possess immunosuppressive properties. Induced...
The term sepsis refers to a complex and heterogeneous syndrome. Although great progress has been made in improving the diagnosis and treatment of this condition, it continues to have a huge impact on morbidity and mortality worldwide. Mesenchymal stem cells are a population of multipotent cells that have immunomodulatory properties, anti-apoptotic effects, and antimicrobial...
Safety evaluations in preclinical studies are needed to confirm before translating a cell-based product into clinical application. We previously developed a serum-free, xeno-free, and chemically defined media (S&XFM–CD) for the derivation of clinical-grade umbilical cord-derived MSCs (UCMSCs), and demonstrated that intraperitoneal administration of UCMSCs in S&XFM–CD (UCMSCS&XFM...
Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) utilize discrete biosynthetic pathways to self-renew and differentiate into specific cell lineages, with undifferentiated hMSCs harbouring reliance on glycolysis and hMSCs differentiating towards an osteogenic phenotype relying on oxidative phosphorylation as an energy source. In this study, the osteogenic differentiation of hMSCs was assessed...
The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had an enormous impact on our societies. Moreover, the disease’s extensive and sustained symptoms are now becoming a nonnegligible medical challenge. In this respect, data indicate that heart failure is one of the most common readmission diagnoses among COVID-19 patients. In this study, we used human induced pluripotent...
Despite a long history of investigation and sustained efforts in clinical testing, the number of market authorisations for mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC) therapies remains limited, with none approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration. Several barriers are impeding the clinical progression of MSC therapies, to the forefront of these is a lack of standardised...
Hepatic osteodystrophy (HOD) is a metabolically associated bone disease mainly manifested as osteoporosis with the characteristic of bone loss induced by chronic liver disease (CLD). Due to its high incidence in CLD patients and increased risk of fracture, the research on HOD has received considerable interest. The specific pathogenesis of HOD has not been fully revealed. While...
This 1-year open-label extension study aimed to identify the persistent synergistic effects of allogeneic umbilical cord blood (UCB) cells and erythropoietin (EPO) in children with cerebral palsy (CP) for up to 2 years. This open-label extension study followed children with CP who were enrolled in the previous randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trial. The following...