In the pathogenesis of diabetes mellitus (DM), islet microvasculares are severely damaged due to glucolipotoxicity and other reasons. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is an indispensable and specific angiogenic factor in the pathogenesis and treatment of diabetic islet microvascular disease. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are regarded as a promising treatment of diabetes because of their immunosuppressive effect and multipotential differentiation potency.

In this study, we tested whether MSCs over-expressing VEGF conditioned medium (MSC-VEGF-CM) could ameliorate pancreatic islet endothelial cells (MS-1) dysfunction induced by a common diabetic inducer palmitate (PA). We found that cell survival and migration were restrained by PA and partly repaired by the pro-protected of MSC-VEGF-CM. Meanwhile, PI-3K/AKT/m-TOR/eNOS and p38/MAPK signaling pathways were also up-regulated. Though apoptosis-related proteins, caspase-3 and caspase-9, had no significantly suppressed between MSC-VEGF-CM and MSC-CM alone, the expression levels of vascular surface factors such as CD31, VE-cadherin, occludin and ICAM-1, were remarkably up-regulated by the pro-protected of MSC-VEGF-CM. Our data suggested that MSC-VEGF-CM had therapeutic effect on the PA-induced dysfunction through the re-activation of PI-3K/AKT/m-TOR/eNOS and p38/MAPK signaling pathways.