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Chronic graft‐versus‐host disease and scleroderma pathology differ in endothelial cell phenotype
Author(s) -
Fleming Jo Nadine,
Shulman Howard M,
Nash Richard,
Johnson Pamela,
Wight Thomas,
Schwartz Stephen Mark
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.22.1_supplement.902.14
Subject(s) - pathology , graft versus host disease , immunohistochemistry , context (archaeology) , phenotype , scleroderma (fungus) , medicine , biology , disease , biochemistry , gene , inoculation , paleontology
Chronic graft versus host disease (cGVHD) has been used as a model for scleroderma (SSc) and interest in research has been focused on comparing the murine models of cGVHD with SSc. The focus of this paper is to examine cGVHD in the context of structural analysis and molecular markers known to be present in SSc. We compared dermal biopsies from SSc patients, cGVHD patients and normal controls using immunohistochemistry, in situ and vascular quantification. We found that although cGVHD shares proteoglycan changes, smooth muscle pathology, and immunologoical changes (including type 1 interferon markers) that we have previously identified in SSc, there is a significant difference in the endothelial cell (EC) phenotype between these two diseases. We used three EC markers to define the endothelial cells in all three sets of biopsies. Vessel quantification showed that although SSc had a significant drop in blood vessel numbers, cGVHD did not. We have previously shown that SSc EC have lost the important canonical EC markers vWF and VE Cadherin. We used two separate methods to determine whether cGVHD lost the vWF and VE cadherin staining in the EC, and both methods showed that the EC in cGVHD retained these markers. We also found that there were areas of microvascular EC proliferation in cGVHD that were not present in the SSc tissues. We speculate that the loss of the canonical EC markers may be important for the process of rarefaction.