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.