Researches and Applications of Stem Cell Secretome

Unlike the terminally differentiated somatic cells, stem cells are characterized by their unlimited, undifferentiated self-renewal, and differentiation potential to adopt diverse phenotypes, a property which is being exploited in cell-based therapy to repair injured organs or tissues. In the body, stem/progenitor cells are an essential part of the body’s intrinsic repair system in tissue injury to replace the damaged cells. Recent data indicate that the mechanism of stem cell therapy’s effectiveness may be due to cells’ paracrine activity more than to the replacement of the injured cells at the site of injury. The paracrine effect stems from their secretome that contains a significant number of growth factors, chemokines, cytokines, and exosomes. The cell secretome’s regulatory role has been validated in various physiological processes, including homing in of the cells to injured body sites, regulating apoptotic processes, proliferation, migration, and differentiation. The immunomodulatory and regenerative capacity of these paracrine factors plays an essential role in determining the therapeutic outcome after treatment with stem cells. As a cell-free regenerative therapeutic alternative, stem cell secretome has enormous potential to alleviate neurodegenerative disease, ischemic stroke, lung diseases, liver diseases, and renal diseases.