Ahmad Ghorbani
Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, Iran
Title: Regenerative pharmacology for the treatment of chronic metabolic diseases
Biography
Biography: Ahmad Ghorbani
Abstract
The increased incidence of chronic metabolic disorders, including diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, has become one of the worldwide health challenges of the 21st century.
Despite extensive effort in the past years to develop new therapeutics, currently available drugs failed to cure these diseases. For example, many diabetic patients in the advanced stage may need organ transplantation because of developing life-threatening complications such as nephropathy and heart failure. However, transplantation therapy is restricted by organ availability and immune reactions, indicating the importance of need for stem cells therapy and tissue regenerative approaches.
Nowadays, substantial progress has been made in cell therapy technologies. In spite of this, several challenges remain to be resolved to achieve more effective therapy. Some of these challenges include: insufficient amount of stem cells that can be obtained from tissues; inadequate migration and homing of exogenous stem cells; limited differentiation potential of stem cells under in vivo situation; and decease of stem cells in damaged tissue.
A growing body of evidence suggests that pharmacological manipulation can help to overcoming these challenges and improve the preclinical and clinical utility of regenerative medicine technologies. This review focuses on studies performed by our research group and others to enhance proliferation, survival, migration, homing, and differentiation potential of stem cells by application of pharmacological sciences.