Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) based cell transplantation therapy is proved to be an attractive strategy with great potential for improvement of hypoxia induced neural damage. In the present study, MSCs were co-culture with PC12 to investigate its protective effects against hypoxia pretreatment, and the Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release assay, MTT and Anexin V staining were performed to analysis the cellular damage or apoptotic. RT-PCR and Western blotting were further used to investigate the underlying mechanism. The results indicate that hypoxia treatment results in the decrease of PC12 cell viability, yet co-culture with MSC could protect the PC12 from hypoxia induced damage. Hypoxia pre activated or EPO transduced MSC with up-regulated erythropoietin (EPO) expression could further enhance MSC's protective effect against hypoxia induced cell damage, which was associated with high level of anti-apoptotic p-Akt and ration Bcl-2/Bax, and decreased Caspase 3 in PC12. Taken together, these data suggests high levels of MSC-mediated cyto-protection is closely tied to high gene expression levels of EPO. The up-regulation of EPO for enhanced MSC-mediated cyto-protection may has great potential for the MSC cellular therapy of neural or neuronal injuries induced by hypoxia. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.