Co‐transplantation of bFGF‐expressing amniotic epithelial cells and neural stem cells promotes functional recovery in spinal cord‐injured rats

Abstract

Copyright: Zhang et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. ABSTRACT Cerebrovascular disease such as stroke is one of the most common diseases in the aging population, and neural stem cells (NSCs) transplantation may provide an alternative therapy for cerebral ischemia. However, a hostile microenvironment in the ischemic brain offers is challenging for the survival of the transplanted cells. Considering the neuroprotective role of basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF), the present study investigated whether bFGF gene-modified NSCs could improve the neurological function deficit after transient middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) in adult male Sprague-Dawley rats. These rats were intravenously injected with modified NSCs (5×10 6 /200 μL) or vehicle 24 h after MCAO. Histological analysis was performed on days 7 and 28 after tMCAO. The survival, migration, proliferation, and differentiation of the transplanted modified C17.2 cells in the brain were improved. In addition, the intravenous infusion of NSCs and bFGF gene-modified C17.2 cells improved the functional recovery as compared to the control. Furthermore, bFGF promoted the C17.2 cell growth, survival, and differentiation into mature neurons within the infarct region. These data suggested that bFGF gene-modified NSCs have the potential to be a therapeutic agent in brain ischemia. www.impactjournals.com/oncotarget/

A Systematic Review of Cellular Transplantation Therapies for Spinal Cord Injury

“…Behaviorally, the cervical weight-compression model revealed improvements on a skilled reaching task (Ogawa et al, 2002). In the seven thoracic contusion studies, behavior was reported in only three, and all observed significant improvements on the BBB locomotor scale (Meng et al, 2008;Okada et al, 2005;Setoguchi et al, 2004). In two of these studies, the effects were further enhanced with adjuvent treatments of noggin (Setoguchi et al, 2004) or bFGF expressing rat amniotic epithelial cells (Meng et al, 2008).…”

“…In the seven thoracic contusion studies, behavior was reported in only three, and all observed significant improvements on the BBB locomotor scale (Meng et al, 2008;Okada et al, 2005;Setoguchi et al, 2004). In two of these studies, the effects were further enhanced with adjuvent treatments of noggin (Setoguchi et al, 2004) or bFGF expressing rat amniotic epithelial cells (Meng et al, 2008). All three studies used a subacute time frame for transplantation (7-9 days), while one direct comparison with the cells transplanted acutely demonstrated the failure of this approach.…”

On the origin of amniotic stem cells: of mice and men

“…These cells can also function as transgene carriers in cell-mediated gene therapy. Promising results in this area have been obtained by in vivo studies using animal models (Kosuga et al, 2001;Liu et al, 2009;Meng et al, 2008;Nakama et al, 2006;Takahashi et al, 2001). Initial experiments show that cells derived from human amniotic fluid can be transduced by viral vectors as well, or used in cell transplantation studies (Grisafi et al, 2008;Pan et al, 2009).…”

Stem Cells: Current Approach and Future Prospects in Spinal Cord Injury Repair

“…These results suggest that amniotic epithelial cells modified with the Basic Fibroblast Growth factor (bFGF) gene could enhance NPCs survival and neural differentiation in vivo and promote repair of the injured spinal cord (Meng et al, 2008). Thonhoff et al suggested that a peptide hydrogel (PuraMatrix TM , 3DM, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was most suitable for human NPC (hNPC) transplantation, because of the low toxicity, suitable gelling capability at a low concentration, gelling upon salt incorporation and permission of hNPC migration (Nisbet et al, 2008;Thonhoff et al, 2008).…”