It affects 28 million people worldwide each year and causes 8 million deaths. This disease is the sepsis, or sepsis, which is triggered when a severe infection causes the body to have a generalized inflammatory response. It corresponds to a generalized infection of the blood. Despite considerable advances in medicine, a patient with sepsis has 27% of risk of dying from this infection in France. This risk rises to 50% for its most serious form, septic shock. If the patient survives, however, the muscular and neurological sequelae can cause serious disabilities. This is why researchers in human histopathology from the Institut Pasteur and researchers from the Stem cells and development unit of the Institut Pasteur and the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) have studied the consequences of sepsis on cells. stem cells that form muscle cells in the arms and legs, in the hope of reducing the risk of disability. Their work is presented in the journal Nature Communications.
Cell transplants directly into the muscles
The researchers observed in mice that after sepsis, the amount of mitochondria, small pieces of cells that provide the energy necessary for all cellular activity, drops dramatically. Result: cells and in particular stem cells muscles no longer have sufficient energy to multiply and differentiate into functional muscle cells. “This early and lasting damage prevents the body from restoring muscle functions and explains the persistent muscle deficit observed in patients.“explain the CNRS and the Pasteur Institute in a press release. From this observation, the researchers embarked on the development of a therapeutic avenue which would consist in cultivating in vitro so-called mesenchymal stem cells and then transplant them into the muscles of patients suffering from sepsis. In mice, researchers have already been able to show “that a transplant of mesenchymal stem cells carried out after septic shock directly at the intramuscular level made it possible to reduce the level of overall inflammation and the associated symptoms: fever, atony (absence of tone) … “. Transplanted cells seem to come to the aid of stem cells lacking in energy, then, once their task has been carried out, they would be eliminated by the body.
Next step for the researchers: to perform this transplant in humans.
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