World Congress of Cardiology Report - Post-infarct regeneration of the damaged myocardium is critical for treatment of patients with acute coronary syndrome or myocardial infarction.
The regeneration process requires formation of new blood vessels from pre-existing vasculature (angiogenesis), or from in situ differentiation of circulating or tissue-resident endothelial progenitor cells (neovasculogenesis).
Adipose tissue-derived stromal cells (ADSCs) have been shown to contribute to postnatal neovascularization. Whether this arises from mature microvascular endothelial cells, contaminating bone marrow-derived hematopoietic progenitor cells, or truly functional adipose tissue-resident endothelial precursor cells (EPCs), is not known.
"We focused on analyzing the endothelial and hematopoietic potential of murine ADSCs, testing the hypothesis that the adipose tissue contains tissue-resident progenitor cells with phenotypical and functional characteristics of EPCs" authors said.
"We found that substantial number of cells expressing scavenging activity toward DiI-acLDL can be isolated from the stromal compartment of the adipose tissue, produced receptor for endothelial growth factor, expressed stem/progenitor cell marker CD133 and CD34 but lower levels of the markers for mature endothelial cells such as von Willebrand factor and endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS)" authors said.
Authors explained that when cultured in methylcellulose medium (a culture procedure demonstrated to be a useful and efficient tool for preservation of cell function, which has been used to identify endothelial cell potential (Gehling UM, Ergun S, Schumacher U, et al. In vitro differentiation of endothelial cells from AC133-positive progenitor cells. Blood. 2000; 95: 3106–3112), ADSCs spontaneously formed branched alignments and tubelike structures, which showed high positivity for CD34 but very little, or no expression of von Willebrand factor.