Wharton's jelly-derived mesenchymal stem cells: phenotypic characterization and optimizing their therapeutic potential for clinical applications.

Wharton's jelly (WJ) is a gelatinous tissue within the umbilical cord that contains myofibroblast-like stromal cells. A unique cell population of WJ that has been suggested as displaying the stemness phenotype is the mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs). Because MSCs' stemness and immune properties appear to be more robustly expressed and functional which are more comparable with fetal than adult-derived MSCs, MSCs harvested from the "young" WJ are considered much more proliferative, immunosuppressive, and even therapeutically active stem cells than those isolated from older, adult tissue sources such as the bone marrow or adipose. The present review discusses the phenotypic characteristics, therapeutic applications, and optimization of experimental protocols for WJ-derived stem cells. MSCs derived from WJ display promising transplantable features, including ease of sourcing, in vitro expandability, differentiation abilities, immune-evasion and immune-regulation capacities. Accumulating evidence demonstrates that WJ-derived stem cells possess many potential advantages as transplantable cells for treatment of various diseases (e.g., cancer, chronic liver disease, cardiovascular diseases, nerve, cartilage and tendon injury). Additional studies are warranted to translate the use of WJ-derived stem cells for clinical applications.

Treating non-motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease with transplantation of stem cells.

Parkinson's disease (PD) treatment-based research has focused on developing therapies for the management of motor symptoms. Non-motor symptoms do not respond to treatments targeting motor deficits, thus necessitating an urgent need to develop new modalities that cater to both motor and non-motor deficits. Stem cell transplantation is potentially therapeutic for PD, but the disease non-motor symptoms have been primarily neglected in such cell therapy regimens. Many types of stem cells are currently available for transplantation therapy, including adult tissue (e.g., bone marrow, placenta)-derived mesenchymal stem cells. The fact that mesenchymal stem cells can replace and rescue degenerated dopaminergic and non-dopaminergic cells suggests their potential for the treatment of motor as well as non-motor symptoms of PD, which is discussed in this article.

The role of DJ-1 in the oxidative stress cell death cascade after stroke.

Oxidative stress is closely associated with secondary cell death in many disorders of the central nervous system including stroke, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease. Among many aberrant oxidative stress-associated proteins, DJ-1 has been associated with the oxidative stress cell death cascade primarily in Parkinson's disease. Although principally expressed in the cytoplasm and nucleus, DJ-1 can be secreted into the serum under pathological condition. Recently, a close pathological association between DJ-1 and oxidative stress in stroke has been implicated. To this end, we and others have demonstrated the important role of mitochondria in neuroprotection for stroke by demonstrating that the translocation of DJ-1 in the mitochondria could potentially mitigate mitochondrial injury. Here, we discuss our recent findings testing the hypothesis that DJ-1 not only functions as a form of intracellular protection from oxidative stress, but that it also utilizes paracrine and/or autocrine cues in order to accomplish extracellular signaling between neighboring neuronal cells, resulting in neuroprotection. This article highlights recent evidence supporting the status of DJ-1 as key anti-oxidative stress therapeutic target for stroke.