Papers of the Week

<i>Significance:</i> Wound healing is a complex process involving pain and inflammation, where innervation plays a central role. Managing wound healing and pain remains an important issue especially in pathologies such as excessive scarring (often leading to fibrosis) or deficient healing leading to chronic wounds. <i>Recent Advances:</i> Advances in therapies using mesenchymal stromal cells offer new insights for treating indications that previously lacked options. Adipose-derived mesenchymal stromal cells (AD-MSCs) are now being used to a much greater extent in clinical trials for regenerative medicine. However, to be really valid, these randomized trials must imperatively follow strict guidelines such as CONSORT Statements. Indeed, AD-MSCs because of their paracrine activities and multipotency, have potential to cure degenerative and/or inflammatory diseases. Combined with their relatively easy access (from adipose tissue) and proliferation capacity, AD-MSCs represent an excellent candidate for allogeneic treatments. <i>Critical Issues:</i> The success of AD-MSC therapy may depend on the robustness of the biological functions of AD-MSCs which requires controlling source heterogeneity and production processes, and development of biomarkers that predict desired responses. Several studies have investigated the effect of AD-MSCs on innervation, wound repair, or pain management separately, but systematic evaluation of how those effects could be combined is lacking. <i>Future Directions:</i> Future studies that explore how AD-MSC therapy can be used to treat difficult to heal wounds, underlining the need to thoroughly characterize the cells used, and standardization of preparation processes are needed. Lastly, how this a priori easy-to-use cell therapy treatment fits into clinical management of pain, improvement of tissue healing and patient quality of life, all need to be explored.