Fig. 8

Isolation, cultivation, and potential clinical application of ERCs. Endometrial regenerative cells (ERCs), which are mesenchymal-like stem cells, were collected from a volunteer’s menstrual blood and identified as a new candidate for immune regulation. It has the advantages of reusing human waste, unlimited source, non-invasive collection method, and easy to large-scale expansion. In this study, we showed for the first time that ERCs could express Gal-9 and found that Gal-9-ERC-mediated therapy could assist in suppressing allogeneic Th1 and Th17 cell response, inhibiting CD8⁺ T cell proliferation, abrogating B cell activation, decreasing donor-specific antibody production, and promoting Tregs both in vitro and in vivo. These findings revealed that Gal-9 was required for ERCs to induce long-term cardiac allograft survival, which provides a novel idea for supplementing the ERC immunoregulatory mechanism and also offers a promising immunomodulation strategy to be verified in the clinical settings (created using www.biorender.com software)