Mesenchymal stem cells for treatment of aortic aneurysms

An aortic aneurysm(AA) is a silent but life-threatening disease that involves rupture. It occurs mainly in aging and severe atherosclerotic damage of the aortic wall. Even though surgical intervention is effective to prevent rupture, surgery for the thoracic and thoraco-abdom-inal aorta is an invasive procedure with high mortality and morbidity. Therefore, an alternative strategy for treatment of AA is required. Recently, the molecular pathology of AA has been clarified. AA is caused by an imbalance between the synthesis and degradation of extracellular matrices in the aortic wall. Chronic inflam-mation enhances the degradation of matrices directly and indirectly, making control of the chronic inflamma-tion crucial for aneurysmal development. Meanwhile, mesenchymal stem cells(MSCs) are known to be ob-tained from an adult population and to differentiate into various types of cells. In addition, MSCs have not only the potential anti-inflammatory and immunosuppres-sive properties but also can be recruited into damagedtissue. MSCs have been widely used as a source for celltherapy to treat various diseases involving graft-versus-host disease, stroke, myocardial infarction, and chronicinflammatory disease such as Crohn's disease clinically.Therefore, administration of MSCs might be availableto treat AA using anti-inflammatory and immnosup-pressive properties. This review provides a summary ofseveral studies on "Cell Therapy for Aortic Aneurysm"including our recent data, and we also discuss the pos-sibility of this kind of treatment.

Electrochemical aptasensor for the detection of vascular endothelial growth factor(VEGF) based on DNA-templated Ag/Pt bimetallic nanoclusters

In this paper, the DNA-templated Ag/Pt bimetallic nanoclusters were successfully synthesized using an optimized synthetic scheme. The obtained DNA-Ag/Pt NCs have an ultrasmall particle size and excellent distribution. The DNA-Ag/Pt NCs show intrinsic peroxidase-mimicking activity and can effectively catalyze the H2O2-mediated oxidation of a substrate, 3,30,5,50-tetramethylbenzidine（TMB）, to produce a blue colored product. Based on this specific property, we employed the aptamer of VEGF to design a label-free electrochemical biosensor for VEGF detection. Under the optimized experimental conditions, a linear range from 6.0 pmol/L to 20 pmol/L was obtained with a detection limit of 4.6 pmol/L. The proposed biosensor demonstrated its high specificity for VEGF and could directly detect the VEGF concentration in human serum samples of breast cancer patients with satisfactory results. This novel electrochemical aptasensor was simple and convenient to use and was cost-effective and label-free in design, and would hold potential applications in medical diagnosis and treatment.