Amniotic fluid stem cell extracellular vesicle therapy improves lung growth and branching morphogenesis in fetal hypoplastic lungs secondary to oligohydramnios

Oligohydramnios is known to cause fetal pulmonary hypoplasia. Amniotic fluid stem cell extracellular vesicles (AFSC-EVs) have shown beneficial effects on hypoplastic lungs secondary to congenital diaphragmatic hernia. Herein, we investigated, whether AFSC-EVs also foster antenatal lung development in hypoplastic lungs secondary to oligohydramnion. We therefore induced surgically oligohydramnion in rat dams and harvested their fetuses. Controls underwent surgery without amniotic fluid drainage. The hypoplastic lungs were assigned to ex vivo to either medium alone or medium + AFSC-EV as a lung explant. Those samples were harvested 24h later and subjected to RNA extraction for subsequent RNA-seq. Overall design: We subjected three fetal control lungs, three fetal hypoplastic lungs and three fetal hypoplastic lungs treated with AFSC-EVs to RNA-seq experiments