Damaging effects of cigarette smoke on organs and stem/progenitor cells and the restorative potential of cell therapy

Abstract

Cigarette smoking (CS) continues to be a significant modifiable factor contributing to a variety of diseases including cardiovascular, pulmonary and renal pathologies. It was suggested that smoking have detrimental effect of the body’s progenitor cells of bone marrow and peripheral organs. Since the concept of cell therapy that utilizes adipose stem/stromal cells (ASC) is gaining momentum it becomes critical to assess the therapeutic activities of the progenitors isolated from smokers. This study has revealed that CS negatively impacts the vasculogenic potential of ASC, in vitro, as well as weakening their therapeutic activity in vivo when tested in mouse model of hindlimb ischemia. We hypothesized that the decrease in vasculogenic activity of ASC is attributed to a higher level of expression of an angiostatic factor Activin A by ASC from CS donors. These findings clearly suggest that smokers should be evaluated for potential exclusion from early clinical trials of autologous cell therapies, or assessed as a separate cohort. The donor’s health status should be considered when choosing between autologous vs allogeneic cell therapies. We then examined the effect of CS on development of kidney pathology in mice. CS exposure led to decrease in kidney weights, capillary rarefaction, and cortical blood perfusion, and in parallel led to increase in kidney fibrosis and iron deposition. Interestingly, infusion of healthy ASC to the mice following CSexposure reversed CS-induced damages. This strongly support the notion that ASC-based therapy may provide rejuvenation effect. In the other subset of studies, we hypothesized that CS-induced lung emphysematous changes are preceded by suppression of bone marrow (BM) hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPC). We have revealed that intermittent BM mobilization with AMD3100 may mitigate the CS-induced myelo-suppression and deterioration of lung function and morphology. We observed that treatment of mice with AMD3100, while exposed to CS, preserves HPC at the levels of healthy control mice. Furthermore, AMD3100 treatment preserved lung parenchyma from pathological changes. These data suggest that while CS has a myelo-suppressive effect, administration of AMD3100 preserved BM-HPC and ameliorated lung damage.