Functional Assessment of Adipose Stem Cells for Xenotransplantation Using Myocardial Infarction Immunocompetent Models: Comparison with Bone Marrow Stem Cells

Recently, preclinical studies have shown that allogeneic adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs), like bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cell (BMSCs) have significant clinical benefits in treating cardiovascular diseases, such as ischemic/infarcted heart. In this study, we tested whether ASCs are also immune tolerant, such that they can be used as universal donor cells for myocardial regenerative therapy. The study also focuses on investigating the potential therapeutic effects of human ASCs (hASCs) for myocardial infarction in xenotransplant model, and compares its effects with that of hBMSCs. The in vitro study confirms the superior proliferation potential and viability of hASCs under normoxic and stressed hypoxic conditions compared with hBMSCs. hASCs also show higher potential in adopting cardiomyocyte phenotype. The major findings of the in vivo study are that (1) both hASCs and hBMSCs implanted into immunocompetent rat hearts with acute myocardial infarction survived the extreme environment of xenogeneic mismatch for 6 weeks; (2) both hASCs and hBMSCs showed significant improvement in myocardial pro/anti-inflammatory cytokine levels with no detectable inflammatory reaction, despite the lack of any immunosuppressive therapy; and (3) hASCs contributed to the remarkable improvement in cardiac function and reduced infarction which was significantly better than that of hBMSC and untreated control groups. Thus, our findings suggest the feasibility of using ASCs, instead of BMSCs, as universal donor cells for xenogeneic or allogeneic cell therapy.