| Stem cells have been a focus in the area of regenerative medicine due to their self-renew and multipotential differentiation ability. Menstrual Blood-derived stem cells (MenSCs) have attracted much attention due to their various properties such as plentiful sources, easy collection, strong proliferation and broader plasticity. However, a systematic study of MenSCs in biological characteristics and clinical research different from other stem cells has not been reported.Firstly, Our study indicated that the culture medium have a great impact on MenSCs. Also, our study contrasted MenSCs that were cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen at different time. The result showed that the cryopeservation system is stable, which would be necessary for clinical use. Different from part of last research on bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs), the impact of donor age on MenSCs was not obvious in our study, but just showed that MenSCs from older donor performance little weaker subculture ability. However, the data showed that gene expression of MenSCs changed largely at different passages, mainly in cell proliferation, immune-related pathways. And there were also differences in gene expression of MenSCs derived from donors of different age. The genes focused on cell proliferation, tumor formation, and cell function. From this part of study, we concluded that MenSCs could be classified as Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) according to the basic standard of International Society for Cellular Therapy (ISCT).Further, the second part of this study contrasted MSCs derived from different sources. The results showed that the differences were obvious. Compared with BMSCs and MenSCs, Umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stem cells (UCMSCs) grew faster and displayed no density growth inhibition. In contrast, MenSCs showed stronger proliferation than BMSCs and UCMSCs. We compared the gene expression of BMSCs, UCMSCs and MenSCs derived from the same donor. The result showed that the different genes expressed in MenSCs mainly involved in cell adhesion, cell cycle, cell growth, inflammation, signal transduction and so on, which concentrated in signaling pathways such as MAPK, TGF-β,p53, insulin, T cell receptor, cytokine receptor. This part of study indicated the specific advantages of MenSCs, which would lay the foundation of MenSCs-based therapy.Finally, we chose acute liver injury as a disease model to investigate the potential for MenSCs of clinical applications. The experiments showed that MenSCs could differentiate into functional hepatocyte-like cells (HLCs) in vitro. Then we transplanted MenSC-derived HLCs and MenSCs into mice with 2/3 partial hepatectomy respectively, the cells transplanted were detected in recipient livers and expressed human ALB protein. The result showed that HLCs transplantation could significantly improve the liver function of injury animals, while MenSCs transplantation could not work effectively. However, the data indicated that MenSCs transplanted could differentiate into functional hepatocyte in vivo. To conclusion, MenSCs may serve as an ideal source for cell therapy of liver disease, but there would be new challenges such as pretreatment of cells, the number of cells, transplantation approach and so on. |
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