Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) can participate in regulating communication signal between immune cells (antigen presenting cell, T cell, B cell, natural killer cell and so on) and induce autoantigen-specific immune tolerance or immunological unresponsiveness by secreting a variety of cytokines and cell-cell contact. This therapeutic strategy makes great significance to auto-immune disease. Some scholars began to try and validate this strategy on autoimmune disease animal models as well.
OBJECTIVE: To understand application progress of MSCs in the field of auto-immune disease.
METHODS: The first author searched PubMed database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed) and OVID database (http://gateway.ovid.com) for literatures concerning MSC immune characteristics, MSCs as a cell therapy manner for auto-immune disease and MSC oncogenicity published from 2005 to 2010. Key words were “Mesenchymal stem cell, immune characteristics, cell-based therapy, autoimmune disease, oncogenicity”. Duplicate articles were excluded. Finally, 31 articles were selected.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Auto-immune characteristics of MSCs and directional differentiation characteristics of stem cells made them distinguished from traditional immunosuppressive drugs. As a new biotherapy, MSCs open a new way for treating auto-immune disease, besides hematopoietic stem cells. Oncogenicity should be further identified and effectively prevented, which may be a main study direction in the field of MSCs. MSC for autoimmune diseases should be strictly kept. There is not enough evidence for replacing the traditional immunosuppressants.