Advance and challenges in stem cell therapy for Alzheimer’ s disease / 中国药理学通报

ABSTRACT

Alzheimer’ s disease ( AD) , the most prevalent type of neurodegenerative disease, characterized by extracellular β-amyloid ( Aβ) plaque deposition, intracellular neurofibrillary tangles, and the loss of diverse neurons. Neuron loss might be the main cause that induces irreversible decline of cognitive function in AD patients. At present, AD therapy only relieves symptoms instead of fundamentally affecting the major pathologi-cal characteristics of the disease. Recently, rapid advances in neurogenesis and stem-cell biology have provided a new and pro-spective potential for AD treatment. Stem-cell types in the treat-ment of neurodegenerative diseases include neural stem cells ( NSCs ) , embryonic stem cells ( ESCs ) , mesenchymal stem cells ( MSCs ) , and induced pluripotent stem cells ( iPSCs ) . Stem cell therapy shows anti-AD function by replacing the dam-aged and lost neurons, rebuilding the cellular loop, inhibiting amyloidogenesis, promoting neurotrophic factor release, and reg-ulating immune reaction. This review highlights the recent pro-gress, mechanisms, and preclinical evidence of exogenous trans-planted stem cell, and addresses the current major challenges of stem cell transplantation in clinic. In addition, this review also summarizes the research status of compound promoting endoge-nous neurogenesis in brief.