Fecal Microbiota Transplantation and Other Gut Microbiota Manipulation Strategies

The gut microbiota is composed of bacteria, archaea, phages, and protozoa. It is now well known that their mutual interactions and metabolism influence host organism pathophysiology. Over the years, there has been growing interest in the composition of the gut microbiota and intervention strategies in order to modulate it. Characterizing the gut microbial populations represents the first step to clarifying the impact on the health/illness equilibrium, and then developing potential tools suited for each clinical disorder. In this review, we discuss the current gut microbiota manipulation strategies available and their clinical applications in personalized medicine. Among them, FMT represents the most widely explored therapeutic tools as recent guidelines and standardization protocols, not only for intestinal disorders. On the other hand, the use of prebiotics and probiotics has evidence of encouraging findings on their safety, patient compliance, and inter-individual effectiveness. In recent years, avant-garde approaches have emerged, including engineered bacterial strains, phage therapy, and genome editing (CRISPR-Cas9), which require further investigation through clinical trials

RegenHeart: A Time-Effective, Low-Concentration, Detergent-Based Method Aiming for Conservative Decellularization of the Whole Heart Organ

Heart failure is the worst outcome of all cardiovascular diseases and still represents nowadays the leading cause of mortality with no effective clinical treatments, apart from organ transplantation with allogeneic or artificial substitutes. Although applied as the gold standard, allogeneic heart transplantation cannot be considered a permanent clinical answer because of several drawbacks, as the side effects of administered immunosuppressive therapies. For the increasing number of heart failure patients, a biological cardiac substitute based on a decellularized organ and autologous cells might be the lifelong, biocompatible solution free from the need for immunosuppression regimen. A novel decellularization method is here proposed and tested on rat hearts in order to reduce the concentration and incubation time with cytotoxic detergents needed to render acellular these organs. By protease inhibition, antioxidation, and excitation–contraction uncoupling in simultaneous perfusion/submersion modality, a strongly limited exposure to detergents was sufficient to generate very well-preserved acellular hearts with unaltered extracellular matrix macro- and microarchitecture, as well as bioactivity

RegenHeart: A Time-Effective, Low-Concentration, Detergent-Based Method Aiming for Conservative Decellularization of the Whole Heart Organ

Heart failure is the worst outcome of all cardiovascular diseases and still represents nowadays the leading cause of mortality with no effective clinical treatments, apart from organ transplantation with allogeneic or artificial substitutes. Although applied as the gold standard, allogeneic heart transplantation cannot be considered a permanent clinical answer because of several drawbacks, as the side effects of administered immunosuppressive therapies. For the increasing number of heart failure patients, a biological cardiac substitute based on a decellularized organ and autologous cells might be the lifelong, biocompatible solution free from the need for immunosuppression regimen. A novel decellularization method is here proposed and tested on rat hearts in order to reduce the concentration and incubation time with cytotoxic detergents needed to render acellular these organs. By protease inhibition, antioxidation, and excitation\u2013contraction uncoupling in simultaneous perfusion/submersion modality, a strongly limited exposure to detergents was sufficient to generate very well-preserved acellular hearts with unaltered extracellular matrix macro- and microarchitecture, as well as bioactivity