Ischaemic heart disease accounts for approximately 7 million deaths worldwide on a yearly basis and this figure is only set to rise as life expectancy in developing countries increases. Although no longer considered a post mitotic organ, the adult heart demonstrates only a very limited capacity for regeneration. Consequently ischaemic injury results in massive loss of contractile cardiomyocytes with damaged myocardium replaced by a non-contractile and poorly conductive collagen scar. This in turn often leads to the development of heart failure. Enhancing or supplementing the myocardial regenerative capacity of the heart is thus a key goal in the development of effective therapies for the treatment of cardiac infarction. Several stem cell populations of non-cardiac origin have been investigated for their capacity to contribute to myocardial repair when therapeutically transplanted into injured hearts. Recent efforts have focused on the “next generation” of donor cells, endogenous cardiac progenitor cells, as these are thought to be better adapted to survival in the cardiac environment and to possess enhanced cardiomyocyte differentiation potential. Pericytes, proposed as the source of the elusive mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) within multiple tissues, are a potential new cell type for use in regenerative medicine. This study tests the hypothesis that pericytes and another perivascular progenitor population, the adventitial cell, from foetal cardiac tissue will positively contribute to the repair of the myocardium post injury. Staining of human foetal ventricular myocardium confirmed the presence of large numbers of both cell types with pericytes tightly associated with capillaries and adventitial cells primarily located in the outer, adventitial layer of muscular arteries. CD146+ CD34- pericytes and CD146- CD34+ adventitial cells were isolated by FACS and expanded in culture. On examination of gene and protein expression both populations stably expressed a similar panel of pericyte markers, MSC markers and cardiac transcription factors as well as c-kit, a cardiac progenitor cell candidate marker. Co-culture with neo-natal rat cardiomyocytes induced expression of an additional cardiac progenitor marker Isl-1 and a mature cardiomyocyte marker ANP in adventitial cells but not pericytes. Labelled, co-cultured, perivascular progenitors readily adhered to rat cells but did not appear to contract independently. De-methylation of perivascular progenitors prior to co-culture resulted in expression of sarcomeric proteins and spontaneous cytoplasmic calcium fluctuations in both populations but more commonly in pericytes. This suggests that cardiac perivascular cells contain a minor sub-population capable of cardiomyocyte differentiation. When these populations were injected into the infarcted hearts of NOD/SCID mice, the animals treated with adventitial cells had significantly reduced cardiac function at 21 days post-surgery on ultrasound examination. An increased scar area and a non-significant trend towards increased scar length and a decreased wall thickness were also observed. Transplanted cells of both groups were detected in low numbers 21 days after injection. Adventitial cells were retained much more readily and in both populations retained cells exhibited three key morphologies: fibroblast type; macrophage type; and cardiomyocyte type. The majority of cells adopted a fibroblast type morphology, lesser numbers a macrophage like morphology and only rare cells a cardiomyocyte like morphology. Both fibroblast and cardiomyocyte type cells had single, human nuclear antigen positive nuclei suggesting true differentiation rather than cell fusion and pericytes exhibited an enhanced ability to differentiate into cardiomyocytes. This supports the in-vitro findings of a minor pro-cardiomyogenic subset within the perivascular cell population. As a result of these findings the starting hypothesis was modified to propose that perivascular cells play a significant role in cardiac fibrosis, largely mediated through expression of surface integrin receptors. This was tested using mice expressing fluorescent proteins under the control of the PDGFR-β promoter and mice in which the αv integrin subunit, common to 5 integrin receptors, had been deleted on the surface of PDGFR-β+ cells. Immunostaining and flow cytometry revealed the PDGFR-β expression to be tightly restricted to perivascular cells and co-expressed with the fibroblast markers, vimentin, PDGFR-α, CD90.2 and CD34 in a subset of cells. Cardiac fibroblasts isolated from reporter mouse hearts revealed strong expression of PDGFR-α and CD34 but PDGFR-β expression in only approximately 20% of the population on flow cytometry. Following angiotensin II induced cardiac hypertrophy and fibrosis approximately 50% of fibroblasts expanding the interstitium were PDGFR-β+. Genetic deletion of the αv integrin subunit on PDGFR-β+ cells resulted in a reduction in cardiac interstitial collagen content of about 50% compared to wild type controls. These findings suggest that the cardiac perivascular PDGFR-β+ population is heterogeneous with a sub-population likely to be fibroblasts or fibroblast progenitors and that the development of cardiac interstitial fibrosis is in part modulated by integrin receptor expression on these cells. In summary this study provides evidence of the existence of a pro-fibrotic progenitor population, which co-express pericyte and MSC markers, within the cardiac perivascular niche. These cells contribute to cardiac fibrosis both on transplantation and endogenously following cardiac injury with the latter mediated via αv integrin expression. Within the perivascular progenitor population however there also appears to be a minor subset of pro-cardiomyogenic cells which are able to adopt a cardiomyocyte phenotype both in-vitro and in-vivo.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:685771 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Baily, James Edward |
| Contributors | Peault, Bruno ; Gray, Gillian |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/15846 |
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