Expansion and angiogenic potential of mesenchymal stem cells from patients with critical limb ischemia

Despite the widely held belief that mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) from patients with multiple vascular comorbidities (eg, diabetes, aged patient) are inferior in quality compared with MSCs from healthy patients, we demonstrate that MSCs from patients with critical limb ischemia have similar angiogenic function in vitro to that of healthy patients and that platelet lysate supplementation of culture media improves the expansion potential of these MSCs. These findings support the use of autologous MSCs to promote angiogenesis and our novel MSC expansion protocol for increasing the number of suitable MSCs from patients with critical limb ischemia for cellular therapy.