“…Mechanistic evaluations of the cytoprotective effect of HPC in stem and progenitor cells have implicated the up-regulation of a diverse array of soluble survival proteins such as growth factor VEGF (Akita et al, 2003;Potier et al, 2007), anti-apoptotic proteins Bcl-2 and Bcl-xL (Francis & Wei, 2010;Hu et al, 2008;Theus et al, 2008;Wang et al, 2008a), antioxidants heme oxygenase-1, hexokinase-2, catalase and superoxide dismutase (Kubo et Theus et al, 2008) and NO (Uemura et al, 2006;Ii et al, 2005) as the contributing factors. Other potential cytokines and growth factors that have been suggested are basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) (Gnecchi et al, 2006), hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) (Gnecchi et al, 2006), IL-1 (Kubo et al 2008), IL-6 (Hung et al, 2007a) and thymosin 4 (Gnecchi et al, 2006), though more supporting evidence for these factors in mediating the pro-survival effect of HPC in the context of stem cell preconditioning are warranted. In addition, HPC has also been shown to activate several transcription factors and signal transduction cascades that are known to be Table 2.…”