Mesenchymal Stem Cell Transplantation in Type 1 Diabetes Treatment: Current Advances and Future Opportunity

Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) is characterized by hyperglycemia, and caused by a lack of insulin secretion. At present there is no cure for T1D and patients are dependent on exogenous insulin for lifelong, which seriously affects their lives. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) can be differentiated to β cell-like cells to rescue the secretion of insulin and reconstruct immunotolerance to preserve the function of islet β cells. Due to the higher proportion of children and adolescents in T1D patients, the efficacy and safety issue of the application of MSC’s transplant in T1D was primarily demonstrated and identified by human clinical trials in this review. Then we clarified the mechanism of MSCs to relieve the symptom of T1D and found out that UC-MSCs have no obvious advantage over the other types of MSCs, the autologous MSCs from BM or menstrual blood with less expanded ex vivo could be the better choice for clinical application to treat with T1D through documentary analysis. Finally, we summarized the advances of MSCs with different interventions such as genetic engineering in the treatment of T1D, and demonstrated the advantages and shortage of MSCs intervened by different treatments in the transplantation, which may enhance the clinical efficacy and overcome the shortcomings in the application of MSCs to T1D in future.