Acceleration of pelvic tissue generation by overexpression of basic fibroblast growth factor in stem cells.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is a common debilitating condition affecting approximately 30-40% of women. The FDA issued a warning about polypropylene mesh used for pelvic floor repair due to erosion, exposure and other complications and banned it in 2019. The application of stem cell therapy and growth factors has strongly promoted the development of pelvic tissue engineering. PURPOSE: we intend to address the issues of direct application of growth factors, the side effects of long-term exogenous treatment, and the directional differentiation of stem cells. Methods: we evaluated the paracrine effects and directional differentiation of adipose mesenchymal stem cells through stable overexpression of basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF). RESULTS: we found that the modified stem cells could continuously and stably release bFGF in the initial stage and could spontaneously differentiate into fibroblasts with a high differentiation efficiency in the later stage. CONCLUSION: following ADSCs are designed to continuously release controllable levels of growth factors during the control period of repair, taking advantage of the paracrine function of stem cells to accelerate cell growth and extracellular matrix (ECM) reconstruction during the early stage of stem cell implantation, and then stem cells are differentiated into target tissues-fibroblasts to accelerate the reconstruction of pelvic floor tissues, this study demonstrated the strong therapeutic potential of this approach for pelvic tissue engineering. ABBREVIATIONS POP Pelvic organ prolapse; ADSCs Adipose-derived stem cells; bFGF Basic fibroblast growth factor; BMSCs Bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells; HUVECs Human umbilical vein endothelial cells; EMSCs Endometrial mesenchymal stem cells; VEGF Vascular endothelial growth factor; PDGF Platelet-derived growth factor ECM Extracellular matrix; IGF Insulin-like growth factor; HGF Hepatocyte growth factor; EGF Epidermal growth factor; BMP-2 Bone morphogenetic protein 2; FBR Foreign body reaction.