Published online Aug 26, 2022. doi: 10.4252/wjsc.v14.i8.658
Peer-review started: March 15, 2022
First decision: April 19, 2022
Revised: April 27, 2022
Accepted: July 26, 2022
Article in press: July 26, 2022
Published online: August 26, 2022
Although bone marrow transplantation (BMT) may be applied to the treatment of hematological and nonhematological diseases, this treatment still presents a series of difficulties and obstacles that corroborate to the treatment failure.
The motivation to study the use of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplantation is that the use of both cells at once may increase the success rate of BMT.
The purpose of this systematic review was to investigate the characteristics of HSCs and MSCs, as well as their various interactions in murine models of cotransplantation.
A systematic review was conducted in the PubMed and Scopus databases, looking for original articles from the last decade that used HSC and MSC cotransplantation, as well as in vivo BMT in animal models, excluding studies involving graft-versus-host disease or other diseases.
Only 18 of 2565 articles found in the databases met the eligibility criteria. Regarding the cell characteristics used in the selected studies, most used MSCs from different human sources, characterized before administration, using a lower dose than HSCs, but by similar routes. HSCs were from human umbilical cord blood or animal BM and the recipients were mainly irradiated immunodeficient mouse. The cotransplantation was evaluated mainly by chimerism followed by hematopoietic reconstruction, showing HSC engraft improvement with concomitant MSC implantation.
The preclinical findings in this systematic review validate the potential of MSCs to enable HSC engraftment in vivo in both xenogeneic and allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation animal models.
The use of HSCs in BMT shows promise for improvement of engraftment in animal models; however, there is still a need for MSC standardization to evaluate the real potential of the therapy in humans.