Research Paper|Volume 11, Issue 12|pp 3900—3908

Mesenchymal stem cells rejuvenate cardiac muscle through regulating macrophage polarization

Busheng Zhang¹, Naishi Zhao¹, Jing Zhang¹, Yu Liu², Dan Zhu¹, Ye Kong¹

¹Department of Cardiac Surgery, Shanghai Chest Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030, China
²Department of Cardiac Surgery, The Second Hospital of Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang 050000, China

* Equal contribution

Received: April 3, 2019Accepted: May 29, 2019Published: June 18, 2019

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102009

Copyright: Zhang et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

We have shown that the effects of transplantation of CD146+ mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) on myocardial regeneration after myocardial infarction (MI) exceeds the effects of transplantation of MSCs, likely resulting from reduction of aging-associated cellular reactive oxygen species in injured cardiac muscle cells (CMCs). Since the role of macrophages in the MSC-mediated recovery of heart function after MI remains unclear, this question was thus addressed in the current study. We found that transplantation of MSCs did not alter the total number of the macrophages in the injured heart, but induced their polarization towards a M2-phenotype. Moreover, administration of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) into MSC-transplanted mice, which prevented M2-polarization of macrophages, abolished the effects of MSCs on recovery of heart function and on the reduction of infarcted cardiac tissue. Thus, our data suggest that MSCs may rejuvenate CMCs after ischemic injury at least partially through induction of M2-polarization of macrophages.