A systematic review of “MSC Therapy” for COVID19 patients

Background: Now that COVID19 has become a global crisis and there's no way to cure it,the necessity of a new treatment strategy has been proven. Each of these treatments should inhibit viral replication and prevent and revers the cytokine storm to be effective. MSC therapy not only has this feature but also, regenerate the damaged cells and have immunomodulatory properties. Method: PubMed, Scopus, Science direct and Google scholar were searched with the keywords “MSC therapy”, “treatment”, “COVID-19”,”cytokine storm” from inception on 2020. Finding: We analysed 24 clinical trials out of 42 trials that were published yet. In these trials the MSCs were extracted from different sources. The usage of umbilical cord MSC, as an after birth-tissue, was the most. Its high cell concentration is an advantage for large-scale use.The average dose of infusion was 10 6 cell/Kg and Mostly through intravenous for 3 times.MSC therapy was conducted in a wide range of patients, however it had better efficacy on severepatients.The outcomes of therapy were reduction in inflammatory cytokines, CRP, TNFalpha, improvement in CT scan and an increase in IL10, and regulatory T cell. No side effects were observed during most of trials.6 of the trials stated that other supportive treatments had been performed in addition to MSC therapy.Conclusion: MSC therapy could be an effective treatment, especially for critically ill patients. Thus, it is necessary to search more extensively on this treatment method. In these trials no properly randomizing also no blinding was observed. Also, a number of trials were without control groups and there was no proportion in the group of patients as well as age proportions. There are limitations on the number of follow-up days for patients and the laboratory factors being evaluated and supportive therapies, in addition to the main treatment, make it inaccurate to evaluate the results of the study.