Therapeutic potential of urine-derived stem cells in renal regeneration following acute kidney injury:A comparative analysis with mesenchymal stem cells

BACKGROUND Acute kidney injury(AKI)is a common clinical syndrome with high morbidity and mortality rates.The use of pluripotent stem cells holds great promise for the treatment of AKI.Urine-derived stem cells(USCs)are a novel and versatile cell source in cell-based therapy and regenerative medicine that provide advantages of a noninvasive,simple,and low-cost approach and are induced with high multidifferentiation potential.Whether these cells could serve as a potential stem cell source for the treatment of AKI has not been determined.METHODS Stem cell markers with multidifferentiation potential were isolated from human amniotic fluid.AKI severe combined immune deficiency(SCID)mice models were induced by means of an intramuscular injection with glycerol.USCs isolated from human-voided urine were administered via tail veins.The functional changes in the kidney were assessed by the levels of blood urea nitrogen and serum creatinine.The histologic changes were evaluated by hematoxylin and eosin staining and transferase dUTP nick-end labeling staining.Meanwhile,we compared the regenerative potential of USCs with bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells(MSCs).RESULTS Treatment with USCs significantly alleviated histological destruction and functional decline.The renal function was rapidly restored after intravenous injection of 5×105 human USCs into SCID mice with glycerol-induced AKI compared with injection of saline.Results from secretion assays conducted in vitro demonstrated that both stem cell varieties released a wide array of cytokines and growth factors.This suggests that a mixture of various mediators closely interacts with their biochemical functions.Two types of stem cells showed enhanced tubular cell prolif-eration and decreased tubular cell apoptosis,although USC treatment was not more effective than MSC treatment.We found that USC therapy significantly improved renal function and histological damage,inhibited inflammation and apoptosis processes in the kidney,and promoted tubular epithelial proliferation.CONCLUSION Our study demonstrated the potential of USCs for the treatment of AKI,representing a new clinical therapeutic strategy.

A secure and high-performance multi-controller architecture for software-defined networking

Controllers play a critical role in software-defined networking(SDN).However,existing singlecontroller SDN architectures are vulnerable to single-point failures,where a controller's capacity can be saturated by flooded flow requests.In addition,due to the complicated interactions between applications and controllers,the flow setup latency is relatively large.To address the above security and performance issues of current SDN controllers,we propose distributed rule store(DRS),a new multi-controller architecture for SDNs.In DRS,the controller caches the flow rules calculated by applications,and distributes these rules to multiple controller instances.Each controller instance holds only a subset of all rules,and periodically checks the consistency of flow rules with each other.Requests from switches are distributed among multiple controllers,in order to mitigate controller capacity saturation attack.At the same time,when rules at one controller are maliciously modified,they can be detected and recovered in time.We implement DRS based on Floodlight and evaluate it with extensive emulation.The results show that DRS can effectively maintain a consistently distributed rule store,and at the same time can achieve a shorter flow setup time and a higher processing throughput,compared with ONOS and Floodlight.