A short excerpt from a YouTube talk by Joy Kong, MD explaining that acute injuries create a toxic, inflammatory local environment (e.g., after a heart attack) that triggers apoptosis and can damage injected stem cells, making immediate post-injury stem-cell therapy less effective.
What's interesting is that when there's acute injury, the environment is very toxic. It's actually not the best time for you to inject stem cells. Just like when you have other types of injury, for example, heart attack, that's an acute injury of your heart. The local environment is quite inflammatory and toxic. There's a lot of cellular cascade going on that's triggering apoptosis. And when you put cells there, it could damage cells and just the signals are not really getting through, and that's not the best time to give stem cells.
