Portable and quantitative evaluation of stem cell therapy towards damaged hepatocytes

Abstract

Stem cell therapy has recently emerged as a breakthrough technology to treat a variety of diseases. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop appropriate methods to evaluate or monitor stem cell therapy efficiency. Herein, we report a portable and quantitative evaluation method for mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)-based therapy for damaged hepatocytes by ubiquitous personal glucose meters (PGM). It is notable that most current methods for quantitative analysis still require laboratory-based or specialized equipment that is not widely available to the general public. PGMs are one of the devices that are successfully used for in-home medical diagnostics and which have worldwide accessibility to the public. Herein, we report an immunosensor based on PGM for the detection of albumin, the most important indicator for evaluating liver function. Albumin detection can be taken as an appropriate marker to evaluate the efficiency of MSC-based repair of damaged hepatocytes. The proposed sandwich-type immunosensor using PGM exhibits high sensitivity (low detection limit (0.5 ng mL⁻¹), wide range (1 × 10⁻³ to 10 μg mL⁻¹)), and good reliability. Given the wide availability of antibodies for numerous targets, the proposed method based on PGM can be successfully applied for sensitive detection of many other non-glucose targets, especially helpful for evaluating or monitoring stem cell therapy.