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©The Author(s) 2025. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Stem Cells. Dec 26, 2025; 17(12): 112100
Published online Dec 26, 2025. doi: 10.4252/wjsc.v17.i12.112100
Published online Dec 26, 2025. doi: 10.4252/wjsc.v17.i12.112100
Human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells alleviated diarrhea-type irritable bowel syndrome by improving intestinal function
He-Ming Zhang, Yu Zhang, An-Xing Zhang, Ruo-Chang Li, Ying An, Yan Li, Department of Gastroenterology, The First People’s Hospital of Yunnan Province, Affiliated Hospital of Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650032, Yunnan Province, China
Guang-Jie Luo, Hai-Bo Dong, Teng-Yun Dong, Hubei Engineering Research Center for Human Stem Cell Preparation, Application and Resource Preservation, Wuhan Optics Valley Vcanbio Pharma Co. Ltd., Wuhan 430000, Hubei Province, China
Peng-Cheng Yu, Department of Production Technology, Yunnan Heze Southwest Bioscience Co. Ltd., Kunming 650032, Yunnan Province, China
Co-first authors: He-Ming Zhang and Yu Zhang.
Author contributions: Zhang HM, Zhang Y, Luo GJ, Zhang AX, and Li Y designed the study; Li Y was the guarantor and revised the article critically for important intellectual content; Zhang HM, Zhang Y, Luo GJ, Zhang AX, Li RC, Dong HB, Dong TY, Yu PC, and An Y participated in the acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of the data and drafted the initial manuscript; All authors participated in the study and jointly reviewed and edited the manuscript. Zhang HM and Zhang Y made significant and equivalent contributions in the research design and manuscript writing and hence are listed as co-authors.
Institutional animal care and use committee statement: The animal experiments conducted in this study was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of Cloud-Clone Corp Wuhan (protocol No. IACU23-1252, on November 29, 2023).
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
ARRIVE guidelines statement: The authors have read the ARRIVE guidelines, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the ARRIVE guidelines.
Data sharing statement: The original RNA-seq data used in this study has been submitted to the National Center for Biotechnology Information database, and the BioProject ID is PRJNA1182067. Sequencing was conducted on the Illumina platform, the sequencing results were screened, classified, and then subjected to sequence denoising or OTU clustering through the QIIME2 dada2 analysis process or the analysis process of the Vsearch software. Additional data can be found in the Supplementary material.
Open Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Yan Li, PhD, Professor, Department of Gastroenterology, The First People’s Hospital of Yunnan Province, Affiliated Hospital of Kunming University of Science and Technology, No. 157 Jinbi Road, Xishan District, Kunming 650032, Yunnan Province, China. hepatocellular@sina.com
Received: July 18, 2025
Revised: August 19, 2025
Accepted: November 6, 2025
Published online: December 26, 2025
Processing time: 161 Days and 0.6 Hours
Revised: August 19, 2025
Accepted: November 6, 2025
Published online: December 26, 2025
Processing time: 161 Days and 0.6 Hours
Core Tip
Core Tip: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a complex bowel disorder marked by recurrent abdominal pain and irregular stools. It is a persistent condition greatly affecting patients’ quality of life. We used three different dosages of human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells to treat diarrheal IBS using a rat model. We performed a series of experiments and found that human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells could reduce the expression of inflammatory factors, improve the expression of intestinal barrier functional proteins, and maintain the abundance and diversity of intestinal flora to restore the intestinal function of diarrheal IBS by colonizing the colon tissue.