{"doi":"10.3390/pharmaceutics15051486","title":"Wound-Healing Effects of Mesenchymal Stromal Cell Secretome in the Cornea and the Role of Exosomes","abstract":"Mesenchymal stromal/stem cells (MSCs) and their secreted factors have been shown to have immunomodulatory and regenerative effects. In this study, we investigated human bone-marrow-derived MSC secretome (MSC-S) for the treatment of corneal epithelial wounds. Specifically, we evaluated the role of MSC extracellular vesicles (EV)/exosomes in mediating the wound-healing effects of the MSC-S. In vitro studies using human corneal epithelial cells showed that MSC-CM increased cell proliferation in HCEC and HCLE cells, while EV-depleted MSC-CM showed lower cell proliferation in both cell lines compared to the MSC-CM group. In vitro and in vivo experiments revealed that 1X MSC-S consistently promoted wound healing more effectively than 0.5X MSC-S, and MSC-CM promoted wound healing in a dose-dependent manner, while exosome deprivation delayed wound healing. We further evaluated the incubation period of MSC-CM on corneal wound healing and showed that MSC-S collected for 72 h is more effective than MSC-S collected for 48 h. Finally, we evaluated the stability of MSC-S under different storage conditions and found that after one cycle of freeze-thawing, MSC-S is stable at 4 °C for up to 4 weeks. Collectively, we identified the following: (i) MSC-EV/Exo as the active ingredient in MSC-S that mediates the wound-healing effects in the corneal epithelium, providing a measure to optimize its dosing for a potential clinical product; (ii) Treatment with EV/Exo-containing MSC-S resulted in an improved corneal barrier and decreased corneal haze/edema relative to EV/Exo-depleted MSC-S; (iii) The stability of MSC-CM for up to 4 weeks showed that the regular storage condition did not significantly impact its stability and therapeutic functions.","journal":"Pharmaceutics","year":2023,"id":321669,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":43,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9619,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":492675,"name":"Khandaker N. Anwar","orcid":"0000-0002-3846-8755","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":922939,"name":"Mohammad Javad Ashraf","orcid":"0000-0002-4987-8477","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":932346,"name":"Hyungjo Lee","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":492678,"name":"Rebecca Jung","orcid":"0000-0002-6448-4484","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":286246,"name":"Raghuram Koganti","orcid":"0000-0002-6551-2475","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":492680,"name":"Mahmood Ghassemi","orcid":"0000-0002-9275-3813","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":492681,"name":"Ali R. Djalilian","orcid":"0000-0002-1489-0724","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":685819,"name":"Seungwon An","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":93,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:07:37.596550Z","pmid":"37242728","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}