Recovery of neurological function of ischemic stroke by application of conditioned medium of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells derived from normal and cerebral ischemia rats

Background: several lines of evidence have demonstrated that bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (bm-msc) release bioactive factors and provide neuroprotection for cns injury. however,it remains elusive whether bm-msc derived from healthy donors or stroke patients provides equal therapeutic potential. the present work aims to characterize bm-msc prepared from normal healthy rats (normbm-msc) and cerebral ischemia rats (ischbm-msc),and examine the effects of their conditioned medium (cm) on ischemic stroke animal model. results: isolated normbm-msc or ischbm-msc formed fibroblastic like morphology and expressed cd29,cd90 and cd44 but failed to express the hematopoietic marker cd34. the number of colony formation of bm-msc was more abundant in ischbm-msc than in normbm-msc. this is in contrast to the amount of ficoll-fractionated mononuclear cells from normal donor and ischemic rats. the effect of cm of bm-msc was further examined in cultures and in middle cerebral artery occlusion (mcao) animal model. both normbm-msc cm and ischbm-msc cm effectively increased neuronal connection and survival in mixed neuron-glial cultures. in vivo,intravenous infusion of normbm-msc cm and ischbm-msc cm after stroke onset remarkably improved functional recovery. furthermore,normbm-msc cm and ischbm-msc cm increased neurogenesis and attenuated microglia/ macrophage infiltration in mcao rat brains. conclusions: our data suggest equal effectiveness of bm-msc cm derived from ischemic animals or from a normal population. our results thus revealed the potential of bm-msc cm on treatment of ischemic stroke. © 2014 tsai et al.; licensee biomed central ltd.