MSCs vs. iPSCs: Potential in therapeutic applications

Abstract

Over the past 2 decades, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have attracted a lot of interest as a unique therapeutic approach for a variety of diseases. MSCs are capable of self-renewal and multilineage differentiation capacity, immunomodulatory, and anti-inflammatory properties allowing it to play a role in regenerative medicine. Furthermore, MSCs are low in tumorigenicity and immune privileged, which permits the use of allogeneic MSCs for therapies that eliminate the need to collect MSCs directly from patients. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) can be generated from adult cells through gene reprogramming with ectopic expression of specific pluripotency factors. Advancement in iPS technology avoids the destruction of embryos to make pluripotent cells, making it free of ethical concerns. iPSCs can self-renew and develop into a plethora of specialized cells making it a useful resource for regenerative medicine as they may be created from any human source. MSCs have also been used to treat individuals infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. MSCs have undergone more clinical trials than iPSCs due to high tumorigenicity, which can trigger oncogenic transformation. In this review, we discussed the overview of mesenchymal stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells. We briefly present therapeutic approaches and COVID-19-related diseases using MSCs and iPSCs.

Comparison of the mesodermal differentiation potential between embryonic stem cells and scalable induced pluripotent stem cells

“…1 The multilineage differentiation potential of the induced MSCs further highlights their suitability for therapeutic applications in treating various diseases and injuries. 29,30 Notably, we observed that the differentiated MSCs from both ESCs and iPSCs expressed low levels of hematopoietic markers, such as CD14, CD19, CD34, and CD45. 31 This finding suggests that the induced MSCs have a low potential to differentiate into hematopoietic lineage.…”

Neural Tissue Engineering with Rat Adipose-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells: The Role of an Injectable, Resorbable Hydrogel Scaffold Derived from Oxidized Alginate and Gelatin

“…The laminin promoted an increase in neuronal differentiation and an increase in the number of neurospheres with migrated neurons . However, the use of iPSCs imposes the threat of mutations and increased probability of teratoma formation as compared to mesenchymal stem cells. CNS-derived neural stem cells and oligodendrocytes combined with an alginate-based scaffold markedly promoted nerve regeneration after spinal cord injury .…”

Designing molecules: directing stem cell differentiation

“…Lentiviruses have a higher cloning capacity and higher infection efficiency than retroviruses. Unlike MMLV, lentiviruses can replicate in dividing and non-dividing cells ( Thanaskody et al, 2022 ). Both lentiviruses and retroviral vectors carry a high risk of insertion mutation during transfection because of their genomic integration.…”