Figure 4.

Both IV and intratracheal (IT) administration of mesenchymal stem cell-extracellular vesicles (MSC-EVs) alleviate lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced lung injury, elevate miR-27a-3p levels, and decrease NFKB1 levels. (A) Similar to the effects of MSCs, administration of EVs via both IV and IT dramatically improved lung injury as shown in histology. Both EVs IV and IT decreased protein concentrations (B), total cell counts (C), and neutrophil counts (D) in the bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) harvested at 48 h after LPS insult. (E) Alveolar macrophages were separated 48 h after LPS insult and assayed for miR-27a-3p expression via quantitative real-time PCR. Results are presented relative to control group. (F) Alveolar macrophages were separated from BAL 48 h after IT LPS insult and assayed for NFKB1 expression via Western blot analysis. Data are expressed as mean ± sd; n = 6. One-way analysis of variance with Bonferroni post hoc test (B-D) or Kruskal-Wallis test with Dunn post hoc test (E,F) was used for the analysis. ^*p < 0.05; ^**p < 0.01; and ^***p < 0.001. (Adopted from Wang et al., 2020a distributed under the creative commons CC BY license).