Progress in the treatment of osteoarthritis with umbilical cord stem cells

Abstract

Osteoarthritis is a chronic degenerative joint disease with an incidence of 81% among people aged over 65 years in China. Osteoarthritis significantly decreases the quality of life of patients, causing physical and psychological damage and posing a serious economic burden. Clinical treatments for osteoarthritis include drug and surgical treatments. Drug treatment can successfully alleviate pain but not satisfactorily reverse joint damage, while surgical intervention is typically used to treat end-stage disease. Stem cells are multi-potential progenitor cells with self-renewal and multi-lineage differentiation abilities, and can differentiate into many kinds of cells, including chondrocytes. Umbilical cord stem cells, also known as Wharton’s jelly mesenchymal stem cells (WJ-MSCs), have become the first choice for cartilage regeneration engineering owing to their availability and convenience of collection. This article reviews the biological characterization of WJ-MSCs in recent years, their advantages compared with other stem cells, and their application in the treatment of osteoarthritis in animal experiments and clinical trials.

Magnetic Nanoparticles and Magnetic Field Exposure Enhances Chondrogenesis of Human Adipose Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells But Not of Wharton Jelly Mesenchymal Stem Cells

“…ADSC and WJMSC are considered efficient cell sources for tissue engineering due to their good proliferative and differentiation capabilities, easiness of access and lack of ethical issues with their procurement. WJMSC of allogeneic origin are reportedly non-immunogenic, can generate clinically relevant number of mesenchymal progenitors and are already the object of clinical trials ( Liang et al, 2020 ). In this study we focused on comparing the two cell sources in respect to their capability to undergo chondrogenic lineage differentiation under magnetically delivered mechanical stimulation.…”

Treatment and application of stem cells from different sources for cartilage injury: a literature review

“…A large number of experiments demonstrated that Wharton's jelly-derived mesenchymal stem cells (WJ-MSCs) are potential to differentiate into chondrocytes under appropriate stimulation and induction. Once this effect is aided by biologically active scaffolds, WJ-MSCs will be able to significantly promote the repair of articular cartilage damage in model animals (83), and this differentiation effect of WJ-MSCs is more durable and can significantly protect articular cartilage from being damaged for a long time (84,85). In addition, it was demonstrated that WJ-MSCs have superior cartilage regeneration ability compared with BM-MSCs.…”

Therapeutic Advances in Diabetes, Autoimmune, and Neurological Diseases

“…TG-C is currently under FDA review with the potential to become the first cell and gene therapy in OA. Injectable mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have also drawn much attention, however the outcomes are controversial in OA [ 384 , 409 , 410 , 413 ]. This could possibly be due to the heterogeneity in MSC preparation and the subsets of OA patient included in the study (e.g., only older patients with knee OA).…”