Table 1.

Comparison of bone marrow-derived stem cells and adipose-derived stem cells as ALI/ARDS therapeutics

	ASCs	BMSCs
Isolation of cells	Safe, relatively non-invasive and inexpensive procedure. Adipose tissue is abundant, expendable, easily accessible, and can be a waste product of many therapeutic and cosmetic procedures	Painful, invasive, and relatively costly procedure
Cell yields	High	Generally low
Proliferation and differentiation	High proliferation kinetics; expandable in culture for autologous transplantation	Differentiation ability impaired with increasing age
Viral infection	Adipose tissue does not have high exposure to viruses	Bone marrow cells are susceptible to virus infection and replication, including hepatitis B and human immunodeficiency virus
Efficacy	Few reports of efficacy in lung injury models to date; not yet tested in sepsis models	Efficacy demonstrated in animal models of ALI and sepsis
Other	ASCs promote the growth of tumor cells

ALI, acute lung injury; ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome; ASC, adipose-derived stem cell; BMSC, bone marrow-derived stem cell.