Abstract
With cardiovascular diseases affecting millions of patients, new treatment strategies are urgently needed. The use of stem cell based approaches has been investigated during the last decades and promising effects have been achieved. However, the beneficial effect of stem cells has been found to being partly due to paracrine functions by alterations of their microenvironment and so an interesting field of research, the “stem- less” approaches has emerged over the last years using or altering the microenvironment, for example, via deletion of senescent cells, application of micro RNAs or by modifying the cellular energy metabolism via targeting mitochondria. Using autologous muscle-derived mitochondria for transplantations into the affected tissues has resulted in promising reports of improvements of cardiac functions in vitro and in vivo. However, since the targeted treatment group represents mainly elderly or otherwise sick patients, it is unclear whether and to what extent autologous mitochondria would exert their beneficial effects in these cases. Stem cells might represent better sources for mitochondria and could enhance the effect of mitochondrial transplantations. Therefore in this review we aim to provide an overview on aging effects of stem cells and mitochondria which might be important for mitochondrial transplantation and to give an overview on the current state in this field together with considerations worthwhile for further investigations.
Highlights
With 600,000 deaths in the United States and 18 million overall, cardiovascular diseases represent the primary cause of death worldwide [1,2]
The beneficial effect of stem cells has been found to being partly due to paracrine functions by alterations of their microenvironment and so an interesting field of research, the “stem- less” approaches has emerged over the last years using or altering the microenvironment, for example, via deletion of senescent cells, application of micro RNAs or by modifying the cellular energy metabolism via targeting mitochondria
In this review we aim to provide an overview on aging effects of stem cells and mitochondria which might be important for mitochondrial transplantation and to give an overview on the current state in this field together with considerations worthwhile for further investigations
Summary
With 600,000 deaths in the United States and 18 million overall, cardiovascular diseases represent the primary cause of death worldwide [1,2]. In the past decades the field of stem cell based treatment strategies emerged as a promising approach to prevent or tackle consequences of disease-caused cardiovascular changes in various application areas. In addition recent research implicated paracrine factors of the stem cells and the microenvironment to enhance the benefit compared to direct stem cell applications used [10,11,12,13] Based on these findings so called “stem-less” approaches emerged as interesting alternatives to the use of stem cells in cardiac medicine. Various positive effects have been described and were attributed to the beneficial effects such as improvement of the microenvironment, the removal of senescent cells, the optimization and application of exosomes, microRNAs (miRNAs) and latest mitochondria [14,15,16] The latter might represent an interesting therapeutic target: Cardiomyocytes heavily rely on an adequate energy metabolism and mitochondria constitute the main energy source of cells. Considerations for further research in this promising area are given
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