In regenerative medicine related to orthopedic conditions, mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) and their extracellular vesicles (EVs) have been proposed as innovative clinical options. The definition of EV-shuttled signals and their modulation under orthopedic settings, such as osteoarthritis (OA), is crucial for MSC-related research, both for basic science and for use in clinical settings, either as therapeutics or as producers of cell-free products such as EVs or secretome. The objective of this work is to compare the literature available on high-throughput EV-miRNA data obtained from adipose-derived MSCs (ASCs) in standard conditions or cultured in high levels of IFNγ, low-level inflammatory conditions mimicking OA synovial fluid (SF), and OA-SF. The first result was that both IFNγ and low-level inflammatory treatment led to an increase, whereas SF led to a reduction in EV release. Second, more than 200 EV-miRNAs were found to be shared across the different conditions. After a bioinformatics search through experimentally validated and OA-related targets, pathways and tissues, several miRNAs resulted in the restoration of cartilage and synovium stability and the homeostasis of inflammatory cells, including macrophages, promoting their switch towards an M2 anti-inflammatory phenotype. Third, IFNγ and especially SF culturing were able to modulate the overall EV-miRNA fingerprint, although the main molecular messages related to OA resulted conserved between treatments with the majority of modulations within 2-fold range. In conclusion, ASC EV-miRNAs may be modulated in their overall landscape by OA-related culturing conditions albeit resulted largely stable in their specific OA-protective signals allowing for a faster clinical translation of these new cell-free therapies for joint diseases.
Keywords: cartilage; extracellular vesicles; immune cells; mesenchymal stromal cells; miRNAs; osteoarthritis; synovium.