Table 3.

The advantages and drawbacks of strategies for improving MSC migration.

Strategy	Advantages	Main Drawbacks	Example	Reference
Treatment with cytokine or cytokine cocktail	Simple and fast	Unwanted genes may be expressed, expensive	Pretreat MSCs with flt3 ligand, stem cell factor (SCF) or hepatocyte growth factor (HGF). Pretreat with GSK3β inhibitor	[67,68]
Hypoxic condition	Simple and fast	Cells probably migrate into non-targeted organs		[72,73]
Treatment with compound	Intravenous injection of LLP2A	Unwanted genes may be expressed, expensive	Treatment MSCs Valproate or lithium	[74]
Genetic modification of MSCs	More directed	Difficult, expensive and risk of tumorigenicity	Overexpression of CXCR4 and integrin β4	[77,78]
Genetic modification of injury tissue	Targeted	Immunogenicity, Retroviral-mediated insertional mutagenesis	Transfection of SDF-1 plasmid to injury tissue	[84]
Injection of ectopic chemokine expressing cells	High efficiency	Safety problems, difficult and expensive	Injection of SDF-1α overexpression MSCs into tissue	[85]
Introduce certain protein expression	No damage for cell viability and function	Safety problems, Difficult and expensive, Risk of tumorigenicity,	Express SLEX on MSCs membrane	[89]
Coating of cell surface with antibodies	More targeted	Difficult and expensive	Bind VCAM-1 antibodies to MSCs bone surface	[90]