THE ANALYSIS OF HUMAN UMBILICAL CORD MESENCHYMAL STEM CELLS AS A PROMISING THERAPY IN OVERCOMING CYTOKINE STORM IN COVID-19 PATIENTS

Background: COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) that was recently characterized as a pandemic. One of the complications of this disease is Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) which is caused by cytokine storm. Current treatments for COVID-19 with ARDS are only symptomatic and have many weaknesses. Therefore, new therapeutic agent for COVID-19 is still needed. This literature review is made to determine the potential of human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells (hUC-MSCs) as a novel therapeutic agent in COVID-19 patients. Methods: This literature review is based on articles from several medical databases such as NCBI Pubmed, Elsevier, and Google Scholar, with the keywords used are “ARDS”, “COVID-19”, “Cytokine Storm”, “hUC-MSCs”, and “Stem cell”. Discussion: There are 5 major studies that correlate with the aim of this literature which were analyzed systematically. Cytokine storm is an excessive immune response caused by the increase of proinflammatory cytokines that can cause organ injury, especially in the lung. On the other hand, hUC-MSCs, a mesenchymal stem cell derived from human umbilical cord, can overcome the cytokine storm in COVID-19 patients by reducing the proinflammatory cytokine, improving lung inflammatory consolidation, increase oxygenation index and increasing the recovery time. Conclusion hUC-MSCs have the potential to become a promising therapeutic agent to overcome the COVID-19 infection.