Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a debilitating disease with no current therapies outside of acute clinical management. While acute, controlled inflammation is important for debris clearance and regeneration after injury, chronic, rampant inflammation plays a significant adverse role in the pathophysiology of secondary brain injury. Immune cell therapies hold unique therapeutic potential for inflammation modulation, due to their active sensing and migration abilities. Macrophages are particularly suited for this task, given the role of macrophages and microglia in the dysregulated inflammatory response after TBI. However, maintaining adoptively transferred macrophages in an anti-inflammatory, wound-healing phenotype against the proinflammatory TBI milieu is essential. To achieve this, we developed discoidal microparticles, termed backpacks, encapsulating anti-inflammatory interleukin-4, and dexamethasone for ex vivo macrophage attachment. Backpacks durably adhered to the surface of macrophages without internalization and maintained an anti-inflammatory phenotype of the carrier macrophage through 7 days in vitro. Backpack-macrophage therapy was scaled up and safely infused into piglets in a cortical impact TBI model. Backpack-macrophages migrated to the brain lesion site and reduced proinflammatory activation of microglia in the lesion penumbra of the rostral gyrus of the cortex and decreased serum concentrations of proinflammatory biomarkers. These immunomodulatory effects elicited a 56% decrease in lesion volume. The results reported here demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, a potential use of a cell therapy intervention for a large animal model of TBI and highlight the potential of macrophage-based therapy. Further investigation is required to elucidate the neuroprotection mechanisms associated with anti-inflammatory macrophage therapy.
© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences.