Intra-articular sustained-release of pirfenidone as a disease-modifying treatment for early osteoarthritis.

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a major clinical challenge, and effective disease-modifying drugs for OA are still lacking due to the complicated pathology and scattered treatment targets. Effective early treatments are urgently needed to prevent OA progression. The excessive amount of transforming growth factor β (TGFβ) is one of the major causes of synovial fibrosis and subchondral bone sclerosis, and such pathogenic changes in early OA precede cartilage damage.

Sourcing of human peripheral blood-derived myeloid angiogenic cells under xeno-free conditions for the treatment of critical limb ischemia.

Background: Critical limb ischemia (CLI) is the most severe form of peripheral artery disease and exhibits a high risk of lower extremity amputations. As even the most promising experimental approaches based on mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) demonstrated only moderate therapeutic effects, we hypothesized that other cell types with intrinsic roles in angiogenesis may exhibit a stronger therapeutic potential. We have previously established a protocol to source human peripheral blood-derived angiogenic cells (BDACs).

Use of tensorial description in tissue remodeling: examples of F-actin distributions in pulmonary arteries in hypoxic hypertension.

A molecular configuration tensor Pij was introduced to analyze the distribution of fibrous proteins in vascular cells for studying cells and tissues biomechanics. We have used this technique to study the biomechanics of vascular remodeling in response to the changes of blood pressure and flow. In this paper, the remodeling of the geometrical arrangement of F-actin fibers in the smooth muscle cells in rat's pulmonary arteries in hypoxic hypertension was studied.