Transplantation of Umbilical Cord-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells Attenuates Surgical Wound-Induced Blood-Brain Barrier Dysfunction in Mice

• Main Authors: Jie Yang (Author), Hongyu Li (Author), Mingzi Ran (Author), Shuxu Yang (Author), Kui Ma (Author), Cuiping Zhang (Author), Minglu Xiao (Author), Yuguang Yang (Author), Xiaobing Fu (Author), Siming Yang (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: Hindawi Limited, 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z.
• Subjects: article
• Online Access: Connect to this object online.
• Notes: 1687-9678; 10.1155/2023/8667045
• Keywords: Internal medicine; RC31-1245
• Source: Stem Cells International, Vol 2023 (2023)

Blood-brain barrier (BBB) is the most important component of central nervous system (CNS) to keep toxins and pathogens from CNS. Although our studies demonstrated that using interleukin-6 antibodies (IL-6-AB) reversed the increased permeability of BBB, IL-6-AB is limited in their application that only could be used a few hours before surgery and seemed delayed the surgical wounds healing process, which urges us to find another more effective method. In this study, we employed the C57BL/6J female mice to investigate the potential effects of umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stem cells (UC-MSCs) transplantation on BBB dysfunction induced by surgical wound. Compared to IL-6-AB, the transplantation of UC-MSCs more effectively decreased the BBB permeability after surgical wound evaluated by dextran tracer (immunofluorescence imaging and luorescence quantification). In addition, UC-MSCs can largely decrease the ratio of proinflammatory cytokine IL-6 to the anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10 in both serum and brain tissue after surgical wound. Moreover, UC-MSCs successfully increased the levels of tight junction proteins (TJs) in BBB such as ZO-1, Occludin, and Claudin-5 and extremely decreased the level of matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9). Interestingly, UC-MSCs treatment also had positive effects on wound healing while protecting the BBB dysfunction induced by surgical wound compared to IL-6-AB treatment. These findings suggest that UC-MSCs transplantation is a highly efficient and promising approach on protecting the integrity of BBB which caused by peripheral traumatic injuries.