Pathological implications of cellular stress in cardiovascular diseases

Cellular stress has been a key factor in the development of cardiovascular diseases. Major types of cellular stress such as mitochondrial stress, endoplasmic reticulum stress, hypoxia, and replicative stress have been implicated in clinical complications of cardiac patients. The heart is the central regulator of the body by supplying oxygenated blood throughout the system. Impairment of cellular function could lead to heart failure, myocardial infarction, ischemia, and even stroke. Understanding the effect of these distinct types of cellular stress on cardiac function is crucial for the scientific community to understand and develop novel therapeutic approaches. This review will comprehensively explain the different mechanisms of cellular stress and the most recent findings related to stress-induced cardiac dysfunction.

Therapeutic potentials of stem cell-derived exosomes in cardiovascular diseases

Exosomes are extracellular vesicles released by many cell types with varying compositions. Major bioactive factors present in exosomes are protein, lipid, mRNA, and miRNA. Exosomes are fundamental regulators of cellular trafficking and signaling in both physiological and pathological conditions. Various conditions such as oxidative stress, endoplasmic reticulum stress, ribosomal stress, and thermal stress alter the concentration of exosomal mRNA, and miRNA, lipids, and proteins. Stem cell-derived exosomes have been shown to regulate a variety of stresses, either inhibiting or promoting cell balance. Stem cell-derived exosomes direct the crosstalk between various cell types which helps recovery by transferring information in proteins, lipids, and so on. This is one of the reasons why exosomes are used as biomarkers for a multitude of disease conditions. This review highlights the bioengineering of fabricated exosomal cargoes. It includes the manipulation and delivery of specific exosomal cargoes such as noncoding RNAs, recombinant proteins, immune modulators, therapeutic drugs, and small molecules. Such therapeutic approaches may precisely deliver the therapeutic drugs at the target site in the management of various disease conditions. Importantly, we have focused on the therapeutic applications of stem cell-derived exosomes in cardiovascular disease conditions such as myocardial infarction, ischemic heart disease, cardiomyopathy, heart failure, sepsis, and cardiac fibrosis. Generally, two approaches are being followed by researchers for exosomal bioengineering. This literature review will shed light on the role of stem cell-derived exosomes in stress balance and provides a new avenue for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases.