The team of Professor Liu Kexuan, Department of Anesthesiology, Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University, revealed the role and mechanism of small intestinal organoids in the treatment of ischemic intestinal injury. Recently, the results were published in Nature Communications.
Zhang Fangling, co-first author of the paper and a doctor of anesthesiology from Nanfang Hospital of Southern Medical University, said that intestinal ischemia/reperfusion injury (I/R) is common in trauma, shock, infection, acute mesenteric ischemia, intestinal obstruction, small intestine transplantation and cardiopulmonary bypass surgery.
Therapeutic effects of organoid transplantation on intestinal I/R intestinal injury. Courtesy of the research team
To this end, Kexuan Liu’s team explored the protective effect and mechanism of small intestinal organoids on intestinal I/R intestinal injury. They successfully cultured small intestinal organoids and implanted them into the damaged intestinal mucosal tissue after intestinal I/R, and found that small intestinal organoids had a good protective effect against intestinal I/R injury. By metabolomics, L-malic acid was co-expressed in the metabolites enriched in the conditioned medium of small intestinal organoids and in the cecal contents of recipient mice after small intestinal organoid transplantation.
The researchers also found that there was a significant negative correlation between the amount of L-malic acid in the preoperative feces of patients undergoing cardiopulmonary bypass cardiac surgery (including the intestinal I/R process) and the degree of postoperative intestinal injury. Furthermore, the research team used SOCS2 knockout mice and macrophage adoptive reinfusion experiments to further explore the role and mechanism of L-malic acid in intestinal I/R intestinal injury, and found that L-malic acid relies on SOCS2 to promote the polarization of macrophage M2 and release IL-10 to alleviate intestinal I/R damage.
Kexuan Liu, the corresponding author of the paper, said that his study revealed that small intestinal organoids can improve intestinal I/R injury by secreting L-malic acid to regulate the immune microenvironment, providing a new strategy for the clinical treatment of ischemic intestinal injury. (Source: Zhu Hanbin, China Science News)
Related Paper Information:https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42502-0
