MSC therapy for inflammatory bowel disease

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) belongs to the group of diseases characterized by idiopathic inflammation of the digestive tract organs. Two basic IBD types are distinguished: ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. The IBD symptoms including vomiting and diarrhea, abdominal pain, rectal bleeding, anemia have a significant negative impact on the general patient’s state of health. Besides, IBD patients are susceptible to the risk of a number of serious diseases such as colorectal cancer, thrombosis and primary sclerosing cholangitis. More than 4 million people in the USA and Europe suffer from IBD, with 70000 new cases diagnosed yearly in the USA only. In some cases, a surgical removal of the damaged digestive tract fragments is required to treat severe IBD forms. However, drug therapy of IBD has mainly been used in the last decades. The rate of remission with application of traditional IBD therapy is estimated as 20-30%, and is still no higher than 50% with the combined therapy. Cell therapy has been proven to be a very promising approach in the IBD treatment. In our review, we discuss mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC) and the most important preclinical and clinical results of their application for the IBD therapy.