Amniotic Epithelial Cells: A New Tool to Combat Aging and Age-Related Diseases?

Abstract

The number of elderly people is growing at an unprecedented rate and this increase of the aging population is expected to have a direct impact on the incidence of age-related diseases and healthcare-associated costs. Thus, it is imperative that new tools are developed to fight and slow age-related diseases. Regenerative medicine is a promising strategy for the maintenance of health and function late in life; however, stem cell-based therapies face several challenges including rejection and tumor transformation. As an alternative, the placenta offers an extraordinary source of fetal stem cells, including the amniotic epithelial cells (AECs), which retain some of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells, but show low immunogenicity, together with immunomodulatory and anti-inflammatory activities. Because of these characteristics, AECs have been widely utilized in regenerative medicine. This perspective highlights different mechanisms triggered by transplanted AECs that could be potentially useful for anti-aging therapies, which include: Graft and differentiation for tissue regeneration in age-related settings, anti-inflammatory behavior to combat “inflammaging,” anti-tumor activity, direct lifespan and healthspan extension properties, and possibly rejuvenation in a manner reminiscent of heterochronic parabiosis. Here, we critically discuss benefits and limitation of AECs-based therapies in age-related diseases.

Large-scale Isolation, Expansion and Characterization of Human Amniotic Epithelial Cells

“…Quantitative expression profile of EpCAM and Cytokeratin ( 3 , 5 , 6 , 10 , 13 & 18 ) as Cyto of uncultured PrePO and cultured cells of AME from 5 different media were analysed by flow cytometry. The triplicates of AMEs derived from 5 different media at passage 1 were used.…”

“…Such practices require frequent infectious diseases screening of various donors for cell sourcing’s, tedious small-scale isolation procedures and multi-stage expansion and cryopreservation procedures. Therefore epithelial cells sourcing from amniotic membrane not only forms an alternative for adult keratinocytes but also has various clinical applications like fibrotic, chronic inflammatory and age related diseases ( 7 – 10 ).…”

Therapeutic efficiency of human amniotic epithelial stem cell-derived functional hepatocyte-like cells in mice with acute hepatic failure

“…Recently, human amniotic epithelial stem cells (hAESCs) have been recognized as one of the most promising stem cells [ 21 – 24 ]. It has been reported that the stem cells derived from term amnion possess multilineage differentiation potential [ 25 ], non-tumorigenicity [ 26 ], low immunogenic profile [ 27 ], and anti-inflammatory functions [ 28 ], reducing the risk of cell rejection and the potential of graft-versus-host disease. In addition, since hAESCs have similar pluripotent properties with embryonic stem cells, they are not associated with the ethical concerns [ 29 ].…”

Hyaluronic acid ameliorates the proliferative ability of human amniotic epithelial cells through activation of TGF-β/BMP signaling

“…Unlike human ESCs, hAECs do not express telomerase and thus are not tumorigenic upon transplantation (Miki, 2018). Based on these excellent properties, hAECs have been widely applied in the pre-clinical treatment of many diseases, e.g., liver cirrhosis (Lin et al, 2015), pulmonary damages (Zhu et al, 2017), neurological disorders (Sankar & Muthusamy, 2003), autoimmune uveitis (Li et al, 2018), diabetes (Luo et al, 2019), early Achilles tendon defects (Barboni et al, 2018), as well as aging-related diseases (Di Germanio et al, 2016). Therefore, hAECs possess considerable therapeutic potentials in regenerative medicine.…”