Characterization of perivascular MSC from the adult human brain

Brain perivascular cells have been recently identified as new mesodermal cell type of the human brain. These cells reside in the perivascular niche and were shown to have mesodermal and – to a lesser extend – tissue-specific differentiation potential. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are widely discussed for the use in cell therapy in many neurological disorders. Therefore it is of importance to better understand the “intrinsic” MSC population of the human brain. Here we systematically characterized adult human brain-derived pericytes during in vitro expansion and differentiation and compared these cells to fetal and adult human brain-derived NSCs and adult human bone marrow derived MSCs. We found that adult human brain pericytes can be isolated from hippocampal as well as cortical white matter, are – in contrast to adult human NSCs – easily expandable in monolayer cultures and show high similarities to human bone marrow-derived MSCs both regarding surface marker expression and whole transcriptome analysis. Human brain pericytes differentiated only in negligible amounts into neuroectodermal cell types using various differentiation conditions but efficiently differentiated into mesodermal progenies. Thus bone marrow-derived MSCs resemble human brain pericytes and might be therefore very interesting for possible autologous NPC-based treatment strategies, cell therapeutic approaches of neurological diseases. For the gene expression microarray analysis we used the Affymetrix U133A chips The whole procedure was performed following the manufacturer's standard protocol (Affymetrix, Santa Clara, CA). For the data processing, normalization was calculated with the GCRMA (GC content corrected Robust Multi-array Analysis) algorithm. Data post-processing and graphics was performed with in-house developed functions in Matlab. 17 samples were analyzed fNSC, Neural Stem Cell, 2 replicates ANPC-hip, adult Neuroprogenitor - Cell Hippocampus, 3 replicates ANPC-wm, adult Neuroprogenitor Cell - White Matter, 3 replicates ABPMC-hip, adult Brain Perivascular Mesodermal Cell - Hippocampus, 3 replicates ABPMC-wm, adult Brain Perivascular Mesodermal Cell - White Matter, 3 replicates MSC, Mesenchymal Stem Cell, 3 replicates