Inflammation, a common mechanism in frailty and COVID19, and stem cells as a therapeutic approach.

Becerra, José; Duran, Ivan

As our life expectancy increases, specific medical conditions appear, and new challenges are met in terms of global health. Frailty has become a medical and scientific concept to define pathologies where inflammation, depressed immune system, cellular senescence, and molecular aging converge. But more importantly, frailty is the ultimate cause of death that limits our life span and deteriorates health in an increasing proportion of the world population. The difficulty of tackling this problem is the combination of factors that influence frailty appearance, like stem cells exhaustion, inflammation, loss of regeneration capability or impaired immunomodulation. To date, multiple research fields have found mechanisms participating in this health condition, but to make progress, science will need to investigate frailty as an interdisciplinary approach. This article summarizes the current efforts to understand frailty from their processes mediated by inflammation, aging, and stem cells to provide a new perspective that unifies the efforts in producing advanced therapies against medical conditions in the context of frailty. We believe this approach against frailty is particularly relevant to COVID19, since frailty people die more frequently due to the hyperinflammatory process associated with this infection. © AlphaMed Press 2021 SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: In recent years, the authors have assisted to important advances in the understanding of stem cell exhaustion as a wide mechanism of disease responsible for age related health deterioration. On the other hand, the stem cell role in immunomodulation has emerged as one of the most promising effects of stem cell therapy targeting the inflammatory process. These two separate topics are now emerging under a common theme and need to be addressed as a whole. The present study intends to put in perspective the common ground among these concepts and offers a future perspective of the next steps in the search for therapeutic approaches to frailty.