Stem cell-derived exosomes for wound healing: current status and promising directions.

Wound healing, especially of chronic wounds, is still an unmet therapeutic area since assessment and management are extremely complicated. Although many efforts have been made to treat wounds, all strategies have achieved limited results for chronic wounds. Stem cell-based therapy is considered a promising approach for complex wounds such as those occurring in diabetics. Mesenchymal stem cell transplantation significantly improves wound closure, angiogenesis and wound healing. However, cell therapy is complex, expensive and time-consuming. Recent studies have shown that stem cell-derived exosomes can be an exciting approach to treat wounds. Exosomes derived from mesenchymal stem cells can induce benefit in almost all stages of wound healing, including control of immune responses, inhibition of inflammation, promoting cell proliferation and angiogenesis, while reducing scar formation during the wound healing process. This review aimed at offering an updated overview of the use of exosomes in biological applications, such as wound healing, and addresses not only current applications but also new directions for this next-generation approach in wound healing.

Slow Loris Trade in Vietnam: Exploring Diverse Knowledge and Values.

Wildlife trade can present a major threat to primate populations. In Vietnam, slow lorises (genus Nycticebus) are subject to local, regional and international demand for diverse uses including as medicine, as meat and for pets. Ethnographic approaches explore the nuances of human-primate interactions in complex sociocultural contexts. We combined ethnographic interviews of key informants with information from questionnaires, focus groups and a movie broadcast on Vietnamese television to explore diverse knowledge and values related to slow lorises and their use in trade in Vietnam. We infer prices, uses and networks for expanding targeted regional and international markets as compared to the opportunistic local one. We highlight key findings related to gendered knowledge about slow lorises and more-than-human ontologies of slow lorises as active participants in human-slow loris interactions. We suggest that conservation efforts should pay attention to the clarification of vernacular names, and use names that highlight ecological or behavioural qualities of slow lorises, rather than other names that could be confused with medicinal remedies. Our results confirm the dynamic complexity of trade in Vietnam, highlighting the importance of ethnographic methods to explore diverse knowledge and values for place-based or site-appropriate conservation management of primates and other highly traded taxa.

Applying systems thinking to inform studies of wildlife trade in primates.

Wildlife trade presents a major threat to primate populations, which are in demand from local to international scales for a variety of uses from food and traditional medicine to the exotic pet trade. We argue that an interdisciplinary framework to facilitate integration of socioeconomic, anthropological, and biological data across multiple spatial and temporal scales is essential to guide the study of wildlife trade dynamics and its impacts on primate populations. Here, we present a new way to design research on wildlife trade in primates using a systems thinking framework. We discuss how we constructed our framework, which follows a social-ecological system framework, to design an ongoing study of local, regional, and international slow loris (Nycticebus spp.) trade in Vietnam. We outline the process of iterative variable exploration and selection via this framework to inform study design. Our framework, guided by systems thinking, enables recognition of complexity in study design, from which the results can inform more holistic, site-appropriate, and effective trade management practices. We place our framework in the context of other approaches to studying wildlife trade and discuss options to address foreseeable challenges to implementing this new framework.