bFGF promotes the differentiation and effectiveness of human bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells in a rotenone model for Parkinson's disease

•bFGF addition along with HBMSCs implantation enhanced their treatment effectiveness.•bFGF promoted the neurogenic differentiation of HBMSCs in vitro and in vivo.•bFGF enhanced the cell viability and proliferation capacity of HBMSCs.•bFGF combined with HBMSCs may represent an improved treatment alternative for PD.

Previous studies have shown that bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) engraftment could alleviate motor dysfunction in parkinsonian animal models, but with limited efficacy and few engrafted cells surviving. On the other side, basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) reportedly displays many effects including neuroprotection and promoting multipotent cells to expand and differentiate. In this study, we assessed whether a combination of bFGF and human BMSCs (HBMSCs) therapy could enhance the treatment effectiveness in Parkinson's disease (PD) rat models. Specifically, bFGF promoted HBMSCs to transdifferentiate toward neural-like lineages in vitro. In addition, HBMSCs transplantation alleviated the motor functional asymmetry, as well as prevented dopaminergic neuron loss in a PD model, while bFGF administration enhances its neurodifferentiation capacity and therapeutic effect. In conclusion, optimizing culture condition like supplementation of bFGF could significantly improve the output of HBMSCs in vitro, and HBMSCs transplantation with bFGF might represent an improved transplantation approach for PD.