Diversity of Vascular Niches in Bones and Joints During Homeostasis, Ageing, and Diseases

The bones and joints in the skeletal system are composed of diverse cell types, including vascular niches, bone cells, connective tissue cells and mineral deposits and regulate whole-body homeostasis. The capacity of maintaining strength and generation of blood lineages lies within the skeletal system. Bone harbours blood and immune cells and their progenitors, and vascular cells provide several immune cell type niches. Blood vessels in bone are phenotypically and functionally diverse, with distinct capillary subtypes exhibiting striking changes with age. The bone vasculature has a special impact on osteogenesis and haematopoiesis, and dysregulation of the vasculature is associated with diverse blood and bone diseases. Ageing is associated with perturbed haematopoiesis, loss of osteogenesis, increased adipogenesis and diminished immune response and immune cell production. Endothelial and perivascular cells impact immune cell production and play a crucial role during inflammation. Here, we discuss normal and maladapted vascular niches in bone during development, homeostasis, ageing and bone diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. Further, we discuss the role of vascular niches during bone malignancy.

Life-cycle assessment of a photovoltaic panel: Assessment of energy intensity of production and environmental impacts

A number of articles have already been published on energy recovery from the sun using solar panels and their environmental impacts. However, in this article, we assess the impact of solar panel technology, and use separately obtained data based on the disassembly of a specific photovoltaic panel into discrete parts. The aim of this article is to list all the environmental impacts of this panel per unit of energy produced and at the same time to focus primarily on deciphering the energy intensity of individual phases of the life cycle of photovoltaic panel production. An analytical method of Life-cycle assessment using the environmental software version SimaPro 9.0.049 with an integrated Ecoinvent 3 database was used to determine the environmental impacts. Throughout the work, we focus on the data obtained, which shows that the process of photovoltaic panel production itself is very energy-intensive, especially in the phase of photovoltaic cell production and solar glass production. In other phases, which is the production of individual parts of the photovoltaic panel, its use, and subsequent recycling, they do not contribute so much to the overall energy balance. In the environmental impact assessment, the most affected aspects were human health, followed by climatic change, resources, and the ecosystem quality came last. In all four of the above categories, the influence of the photovoltaic cell production phase was determined to be dominant.

A Durable Anatomy with Local Plasticity Enables Normal and Stress Hematopoiesis

Knowledge of the anatomy of each tissue and the relationships between progenitors and daughter cells is necessary to understand physiology and pathology. The anatomy of hematopoiesis in the marrow remains largely unknown. Here we identify strategies to image all steps of blood cell production in the mouse sternum using confocal microscopy. We show that long-distance migration of multipotent progenitors, lineage-committed progenitor recruitment to vessels, and generation of lineage-specific oligoclonal structures that are the main production sites for immature cells are key features of the anatomy of blood production. This structural organization is extremely durable and resilient to insults as it was maintained after hemorrhage, Listeria monocytogenes infection, and aging (80-weeks). Importantly, this anatomy is also enabled with local plasticity as production sites for each blood lineage selectively expand/contract in respond to insults followed by a return to homeostasis. We used immunophenotyping to identify fifty-six surface markers that can be combined to image any populations of interest. For example, we found that ESAM is selectively expressed in 100% of LT-HSC, 90% of ST-HSC, 70% of MPP2 and MPP3, 30% of MPP4, 10% of CMP, and 90% of MkP and megakaryocytes but absent in more mature cells. Transplantation experiments revealed that all functional LT- and ST-HSC, MPP2, MPP3 and CMP were contained -exclusively- in the ESAM positive fraction (p<0.05 when compared with ESAM- cells n= 7 mice per group). ESAM + MPP4 displayed 5-fold more engraftment than ESAM - MPP4 (p<0.05). Combining ESAM with classical HSPC markers allowed imaging of all LT-HSC, ST-HSC, MkP, Pre-MegE, MPP2 and a mixed population of MPP3, CMP and MPP4. We developed similar strategies to map erythropoiesis (Pre-MegE → Pre-CFU-E → CFU-E → early erythroblast → late erythroblast → reticulocyte → erythrocyte) and lymphopoiesis (CLP→ PreProB → ProB →PreB→ Immature B). All strategies allowed clonal fate-mapping using Ubc-cre ERT2:confetti mice. In this model tamoxifen treatment leads to irreversible expression of one out of four fluorescent proteins. We found that multipotent and oligopotent progenitors are found as single cells, evenly distributed through the marrow (e.g. mean LT-HSC distance to closest ST-HSC, MPP2, MPP3, MkP, Pre-MegE >100 μm, no different from random simulations, n=41 LT-HSC from 5 sternum sections of 4 wild-type mice) and are clonally unrelated between them. Multipotent and oligopotent progenitors reside near sinusoids (mean distance =9.7 μm) but this association is not different from that observed for random cells. In contrast, as progenitors become lineage-restricted, they localize to arterioles (for lymphoid progenitors) or sinusoids (all other progenitors) where they enter oligoclonal structures that are the main production sites for immature cells in each lineage. Each production site has distinct architectures: lymphoid sites are characterized by tight clusters of PreProB cells surrounding CLP; erythroid sites are characterized by strings of 4-21 CFU-E decorating the surface of sinusoids with early erythroblasts differentiating orthogonally to the vessel surface; in megakaryocyte sites one or two megakaryocyte progenitors produce megakaryocytes that decorate blood vessels over large (>200μm 3) marrow regions. We previously showed that production sites for neutrophils contain 1 or 2 granulocyte progenitors tightly clustered with preneutrophils and that sites for monocytes/dendritic cells contain loose clusters of dendritic cells surrounding monocyte dendritic cell progenitors (Zhang Nature 2021). This spatial architecture is durable and resilient and is maintained after acute challenge via phlebotomy, L. monocytogenes infection, or physiological aging (80-week-old mice). However, we also observed plasticity of production sites. Two days after phlebotomy we found increases in erythroid site numbers (368 vs 945 per mm 3, p<0.05). These expansions were reversed by day 8 after phlebotomy. Similarly, infection led to increases in the size of neutrophil and dendritic cell production sites (~2-fold by day 6 post-infection) but these changes are reverted by day 20 post-infection. In summary, we have developed strategies that allow imaging of differentiation in situ and defined a complex - but durable and plastic- anatomy for the hematopoietic tissue. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

103 Quality improvement of anti-CD38-JAK/STAT CAR-T cells by suppressing CD38 expression and inhibition of tyrosine kinase

BackgroundCAR-T cell therapy has shown highly effective clinical results in several diseases, but further improvement is necessary to target a wider range of antigens and tumors. In particular, excessive activation of CAR-T cells leads to cell exhaustion and reduction of naive/memory T cells’ population, which are important for long-term immune response. Therefore, suppressing non-antigen-specific activity is necessary for CAR-T cell production. However, when targeting tumor-related antigens that are also expressed on T cells, CAR-T cells recognize the antigens on the T cells, resulting in fratricide, poor cell growth, differentiation, and exhaustion during cell production process.In this study, we investigated a method for producing CAR-T cells targeting CD38 antigen that is common to T cells and tumor cells. CD38 is a suitable target antigen for CAR-T cell therapy because it is highly expressed in lymphocyte malignant tumors including B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and multiple myeloma. However, as it is also intermediately expressed in normal blood cells, unwanted activation of CAR-T cells may be caused.MethodsWe tried to suppress the expression of CD38 in CAR-T cells by co-expressing CD38 siRNAs, and prevent activation during cell production by modifying the signal domain of anti-CD38-CAR to the newly developed JAK/STAT-CAR. JAK/STAT-CAR contains the intracellular domain of the IL-2 receptor β chain and the STAT3 binding motif, which have been shown to improve the proliferation of CAR-T cells and suppresses differentiation compared to conventional second-generation CAR-T cells.For further improvement, CAR-T cells were prepared in the presence of the tyrosine kinase inhibitor Dasatinib to suppress activation during the cell manufacturing process.ResultsCD38 siRNA co-expressing CAR-T cells showed decreased expression of CD38 and exhaustion markers, and the further reduction of exhaustion marker expression was observed in JAK/STAT CAR-T cells. However, compared to CAR-T cells targeting other antigens, CD38-CAR-T cells tended to be more exhausted and differentiated. As Dasatinib treatment maintained a high proportion of naive/memory T cells and was able to suppress exhaustion, combination of these approaches (CD38 siRNA-expressing CD38-JAK/STAT CAR-T cells with Dasatinib treatment) showed long-term persistence of antitumor activity in in vitro re-challenge assay.ConclusionsCD38 siRNA co-expressing CD38-JAK/STAT CAR-T cells produced in the presence of a tyrosine kinase inhibitor are expected to be suppressed excessive activation and maintain long-term antigen-specific activity. This approach is also expected to be applied to other CAR-T cell therapies targeting tumor-related antigens expressed on T cells.

A Band Model of Cambium Development: Opportunities and Prospects

More than 60% of tree phytomass is concentrated in stem wood, which is the result of periodic activity of the cambium. Nevertheless, there are few attempts to quantitatively describe cambium dynamics. In this study, we develop a state-of-the-art band model of cambium development, based on the kinetic heterogeneity of the cambial zone and the connectivity of the cell structure. The model describes seasonal cambium development based on an exponential function under climate forcing which can be effectively used to estimate the seasonal cell production for individual trees. It was shown that the model is able to simulate different cell production for fast-, middle- and slow-growing trees under the same climate forcing. Based on actual measurements of cell production for two contrasted trees, the model effectively reconstructed long-term cell production variability (up to 75% of explained variance) of both tree-ring characteristics over the period 1937−2012. The new model significantly simplifies the assessment of seasonal cell production for individual trees of a studied forest stand and allows the entire range of individual absolute variability in the ring formation of any tree in the stand to be quantified, which can lead to a better understanding of the anatomy of xylem formation, a key component of the carbon cycle.