Medically licensed mesenchymal stem cells for acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) is a devastating condition, which kills 40% of sufferers, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide annually. Despite decades of intensive research efforts, there are no clinical therapeutic strategies available for this catastrophic condition. In our ERC Starter Grant, HA-NFkB-VILI, we have shown Mesenchymal Stem Cells (MSCs) to be beneficial in several relevant preclinical ARDS models. 
However, for cell therapies to be successfully used in the clinic, they will need to be sourced allogeneically, culture passaged and cryofrozen for transport to the clinical site, where they can then thawed near the bedside and administered to the patient with ARDS.
This project will therefore examine the potential of cryofrozen human MSCs, manufactured at the CCMI cell therapy facility at NUI Galway, in relevant models of ARDS.
A demonstration that the cryofrozen CCMI-hMSC exhibit therapeutic potential would be a major step towards the clinical testing of these cells in patients with this devastating disease.