Injectable hydrogel delivery plus preconditioning of mesenchymal stem cells: exploitation of SDF-1/CXCR4 axis toward enhancing the efficacy of stem cells' homing.

Clinical applications of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) rely on their capacity to home and engraft in the appropriate target injury tissues for the long term. However, their homing efficiency has been observed to be very poor because of the lack or modifications of homing factors SDF-1α and CXCR4 receptors. Hence, this study was designed to investigate the homing and retention of pretreated human adipose tissue-derived MSCs (hASCs) from three different delivery routes in response to SDF-1α, released from chitosan-based injectable hydrogels.