Adult stem cell as new advanced therapy for experimental neuropathic pain treatment.

Silvia Franchi,Paola Sacerdote,Daniela Ferrari,Anna Teresa Brini,Stefania Niada,Giada Amodeo,Mara Castelli,Angelo Vescovi,Alberto Emilio Panerai

doi:10.1155/2014/470983

Abstract

Neuropathic pain (NP) is a highly invalidating disease resulting as consequence of a lesion or disease affecting the somatosensory system. All the pharmacological treatments today in use give a long lasting pain relief only in a limited percentage of patients before pain reappears making NP an incurable disease. New approaches are therefore needed and research is testing stem cell usage. Several papers have been written on experimental neuropathic pain treatment using stem cells of different origin and species to treat experimental NP. The original idea was based on the capacity of stem cell to offer a totipotent cellular source for replacing injured neural cells and for delivering trophic factors to lesion site; soon the researchers agreed that the capacity of stem cells to contrast NP was not dependent upon their regenerative effect but was mostly linked to a bidirectional interaction between the stem cell and damaged microenvironment resident cells. In this paper we review the preclinical studies produced in the last years assessing the effects induced by several stem cells in different models of neuropathic pain. The overall positive results obtained on pain remission by using stem cells that are safe, of easy isolation, and which may allow an autologous transplant in patients may be encouraging for moving from bench to bedside, although there are several issues that still need to be solved.

Highlights

Neuropathic pain (NP), currently defined as “pain arising as a direct consequence of a lesion or disease affecting the somatosensory system” [1], represents the most severe form of chronic pain considering its capacity to affect both physical and mental patient’s condition
In this paper we review the literature in which stem cells of different origin and species were used to treat neuropathic pain induced in experimental animal models
Considering the nature of the lesion at the basis of NP development that takes place in peripheral nervous system (PNS) or central nervous system (CNS), neural stem cells (NSCs) seem to be the most appropriate type of cells to prompt a physiological repair of the lesion, due to their capacity to differentiate into neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes, even though it was suggested that mesenchymal stem cells, under particular conditions, can originate cells of the neural lineage [11,12,13]

Summary

Introduction

Neuropathic pain (NP), currently defined as “pain arising as a direct consequence of a lesion or disease affecting the somatosensory system” [1], represents the most severe form of chronic pain considering its capacity to affect both physical and mental patient’s condition. In the last years many researchers, including us, have tried to relieve neuropathic pain by using stem cells of different origin. Soon we and others realized that the capacity of stem cells to contrast experimental neuropathic pain was not completely dependent upon their regenerative effect; many research papers described an antinociceptive effect of the stem cell achieved before the appearance of regenerative effect [10]. In this paper we review the literature in which stem cells of different origin and species were used to treat neuropathic pain induced in experimental animal models. We divide the published papers according to the type of stem cell used, independently of the experimental NP model. We considered only papers in which the effect of stem cells on pain behaviour has been evaluated. Today there are three main types of stem cells used for neuropathic pain: neural stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells, and bone marrow mononuclear cells

Neural Stem Cells

Bone Marrow Derived Mononuclear Cells

Conclusions