earticle

영어

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a common autoimmune disease in the world, and is characterized by synovial hyperplasia, inflammatory cell infiltration, cartilage degradation, bone erosion, joint destruction and an increase in the levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Current therapies for RA focus on the inhibition of inflammatory cascade using anti-inflammatory substances to prevent or delay the progression of symptoms, however, the efficacy is varied and limited. Therefore, MSCs are considered as a potential candidate for RA treatment due to their immunomodulation properties in inflammation milieu. Meanwhile, synovial fluid (SF) is a significant source of MSCs in RA therapy; the SF is an easily accessible source of MSCs, which can be obtained during diagnosis or treatment of RA patients without additional harming, in addition, it is well addressed that the population of MSCs derived from SF (SF-MSCs) in arthritis patients is extensively increased in comparison to that in healthy patients. Hence, we have investigated whether the immunomodulation properties of SF-MSCs are capable of improving the symptoms of RA as the new therapeutic approach. For the purpose of the aforementioned objective, we have conducted: establishment of the method for isolation of SF and bone marrow (BM) specimens from minipigs, exploration of the most stable reference genes in porcine MSCs for the further analysis, comparative evaluations between porcine SF- and BM-MSCs with respect to the pluripotent capacities and the immunomodulation properties in RA animal model, comparative characterizations of human SF-MSCs obtained from different disease-graded RA patients, identification for alterations of immunomodulation properties depending on the degree of inflammation milieu in SF-MSCs from human RA patients, and establishment of new large animal RA model in minipig. We hope that these results can contribute to better understand the pathogenesis and etiology of RA as well as develop new therapeutic strategy.