Cellule staminali mesenchimali dell'amnios equino per il trattamento delle tendinopatie del cavallo sportivo: prima segnalazione

Regenerative medicine is an emerging and multidisciplinary field which draws on biology, medicine and genetic manipulation for the development of strategies aimed at maintaining, enhancing or restoring the function of tissues or organs that have been compromised by disease or injury. Because of their ability to differentiate into different cell lines, stem cells undoubtedly play a key role in developing such strategies. The embryonic cells are totipotent, but their isolation involves the destruction of the embryo and the application is limited from their oncogenic potential. Adult stem cells (i.e. from bone marrow, BM) have a limited potential compared to embryonic stem cells in terms of both in vitro proliferation ability and differentiation capacity, and do not appear to noticeably improve long-term functionality. Stem/progenitor cells derived from extra-fetal sources may represent attractive alternative candidates with the potential to circumvent many of these limitations, opening new perspectives for developmental biology and regenerative medicine. The aims of this work were to provide, for the first time, an isolation protocol for horse amnionderived cells, to investigate the biological properties of these cells and to assess whether horse amnion-derived cells can be tolerated and exert beneficial effects in vivo when allogenically transplanted into horses with tendon injuries. Our results have shown that these cells have high prolificacy and plasticity, differentiating in vitro toward mesodermic and ectodermic lineages, and own ability to be frozen without loss of their characteristics.Through cell transplantation studies in vivo, we found that the transplanted equine amnion-derived cells were well-tolerated by horses, and all of the clinical findings reported provided compelling evidence to support the exertion of beneficial effects by the injected cells. The possibility of administering an immediate intralesional treatment which is available before any ultrastructural change is observed within the injured tendon, together with the plasticity effect of amniotic MSCs, represent the major features of interest for this novel biotechnological approach to equine tendinopathies.