The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic situation forced the scientific community to explore all the possibilities from various fields, and so far we have seen a lot of surprises, eureka moments and disappointments. One of the approaches from the cellular therapists was exploiting the immunomodulatory and regenerative potential of mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs), more so of MSC-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs)—particularly exosomes, in order to alleviate the cytokine storm and regenerate the damaged lung tissues. Unlike MSCs, the EVs are easier to store, deliver, and are previously shown to be as effective as MSCs, yet less immunogenic. These features attracted the attention of many and thus led to a tremendous increase in publications, clinical trials and patent applications. This review presents the current landscape of the field and highlights some interesting findings on MSC-derived EVs in the context of COVID-19, including in silico, in vitro, in vivo and case reports. The data strongly suggests the potential of MSC-derived EVs as a therapeutic regime for the management of acute lung injury and associated complications in COVID-19 and beyond.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The International Society for Cellular Therapy (ISCT) proposed a set of minimal markers for identifying human mesenchymal stromal cells (hMSCs) in 2007. Since then, with the growing interest of better characterising hMSCs, various additional surface markers have been proposed. However, the impact of how culture conditions, in particular, the culture surface, vary the expression of hMSC markers was overlooked. METHODS AND RESULTS: In this study, we utilized the RNA sequencing data on hMSCs cultured on different surfaces to investigate the variation of the proposed hMSC biomarkers. One of the three ISCT proposed positive biomarker, CD90 was found to be significantly down regulated on hMSCs culture on fibrous surfaces when compared to flat surfaces. The detected gene expression values for 177 hMSCs biomarkers compiled from the literature are reported here. Correlation and cluster analysis revealed the existence of different biomarker communities that displayed a similar expression profile. We found a list of hMSCs biomarkers which are the least sensitive to a change in surface properties and another list of biomarkers which are found to have high sensitivity to a change in surface properties. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrated that substrate properties have paramount effect on altering the expressions of hMSCs biomarkers and the proposed list of substrate-stable and substrate-sensitive biomarkers would better assist in the population characterisation. However, proteomic level analysis would be essential to confirm the observations noted.
Biomarkers ; Chemistry ; Gene Expression ; Humans ; Mesenchymal Stromal Cells ; Quality Control ; Regenerative Medicine ; Sequence Analysis, RNA ; Surface Properties ; Transcriptome