Transplantation of Adipose Tissue-Derived Stem Cells for Treatment of Focal Cerebral Ischemia

The neurological functional disabilities caused by cerebral infarction significantly deteriorate life quality and increase the medical and socio-economic costs. Although some molecular agents show potential in acting against the pathological mechanisms in animal studies, none has been proven effective for cerebral ischemia treatment in human patients. New treatment strategy needs to be developed. Stem cell therapy is promising for neural regeneration and thus become one of the current trends. More evidence has shown stem cells, such as embryonic stem cells (ESCs), skeletal muscle satellite cells and mesenchymal stem cells, to be useful in tissue repair and regeneration. However all these stem cells mentioned above have limitations. Adipose tissue-derived stem cells (ADSCs) are an alternative autologous stem cell source for the characters as abundant, easy to obtain, immunological and ethic problem free. So far, this treatment strategy has been rarely adopted on ischemic brain injury. In this study, we investigated the transplantation effects of rat ADSCs for the treatment of cerebral ischemia in rats. ADSCs were isolated from rat adipose tissue and then induced to initiate neural differentiation. Following neural induction, ADSCs developed neural morphology and displayed molecular expression of Nestin, MAP2 and GFAP. We evaluate the neurobehavioral function, infarct volume and cell properties as apoptosis, survival, migration, proliferation, differentiation and immunogenicity. Treatment with i-ADSCs (induction from ADSCs) results in better functional recovery and more reduction in hemispheric atrophy then without i-ADSCs in other groups. Our study demonstrates that i-ADSCs therapy is promising in stroke treatment and finally leads to an efficacious therapeutic modalities for much better outcome in clinical patients.