Basic Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Transl Med. Dec 12, 2015; 4(3): 88-100
Published online Dec 12, 2015. doi: 10.5528/wjtm.v4.i3.88
New categorization of human vascular endothelial cells by pro- vs anti-proliferative phenotypes
Miwako Nishio, Masako Nakahara, Chikako Sato, Koichi Saeki, Hidenori Akutsu, Akihiro Umezawa, Kazuyuki Tobe, Kazuki Yasuda, Akira Yuo, Kumiko Saeki
Miwako Nishio, Masako Nakahara, Chikako Sato, Akira Yuo, Kumiko Saeki, Department of Disease Control, Research Institute, National Center for Global Health and Medicine, Tokyo 162-8655, Japan
Koichi Saeki, Section of Cell Engineering, Department of Basic Research, DNAVEC Center, ID Pharma Co., Ltd., Ibaraki 300-2611, Japan
Hidenori Akutsu, Akihiro Umezawa, Department of Reproductive Biology, National Research Institute for Child Health and Development, Tokyo 157-8535, Japan
Kazuyuki Tobe, First Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine, Toyama University, Toyama 930-0194, Japan
Kazuki Yasuda, Department of Metabolic Disorder, Diabetes Research Center, Research Institute, National Center for Global Health and Medicine, Tokyo 162-8655, Japan
Kumiko Saeki, PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Saitama 332-0012, Japan
Author contributions: Nishio M, Nakahara M and Sato C performed the experiments and analyzed the data; Saeki K, Akutsu H and Umezawa A contributed to the establishment of human iPS cells, Tobe K, Yasuda K and Yuo A coordinated the research; Saeki K designed the research and wrote the paper.
Supported by A Grant-in-Aid from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan (KHD1017); a Grant-in-Aid from JST and PRESTO.
Institutional review board statement: The study was performed after having received an approval by the Japanese Government and the institutional review board of National Center for Global Health and Medicine.
Conflict-of-interest statement: None of the authors has any potential financial conflict of interest to be declared regarding this manuscript.
Data sharing statement: Technical appendix and dataset are available from the corresponding author.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Kumiko Saeki, MD, PhD, Division Chief, Department of Disease Control, Research Institute, National Center for Global Health and Medicine, 1-21-1 Toyama Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 162-8655, Japan. saeki@ri.ncgm.go.jp
Telephone: +81-3-32027181 Fax: +81-3-32027364
Received: June 24, 2015
Peer-review started: June 29, 2015
First decision: August 10, 2015
Revised: September 24, 2015
Accepted: October 12, 2015
Article in press: October 13, 2015
Published online: December 12, 2015
Processing time: 175 Days and 0.9 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: There is a longstanding controversy over the effects of vascular endothelial cells (VECs) on the proliferation of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs). Since the controversy came from lack of systematic studies, we performed an integrated analysis using various human VECs to quantitatively evaluate their effects on VSMC proliferation. Here we report that: (1) human VECs are classified into two groups: pro-proliferative (type-I) vs“anti-proliferative” (type-II); (2) oxidative stress and ageing induced “type-II to type-I” conversion; and (3) RGS5 is the responsible gene for VEC phenotype determinations. Thus, human VECs are categorized into pro-proliferative RGS5high (type-I) and anti-proliferative RGS5low (type-II) VECs.