Cold and hot fibrosis define clinically distinct cardiac pathologies
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ABSTRACT: Fibrosis is a pathology of excessive scarring and a major unmet medical need. Identifying key simplifying principles is needed to better understand fibrosis and may yield new therapeutic approaches. Fibrosis is driven by myofibroblasts that interact with macrophages. We developed a cell-circuit model that predicted two types of fibrosis - ‘hot fibrosis’ that includes both macrophages and myofibroblasts, and ‘cold fibrosis’ dominated by myofibroblasts alone. Here, we tested these concepts using an in-vivo pathological model for cardiac fibrosis resulting from myocardial infarction (MI). We show that MI progresses into cold fibrosis in both mice and pigs. We used the cell-circuit model to find a fragility of cold fibrosis - the autocrine loop which supports myofibroblast growth. We identified the growth factors in the autocrine loop and demonstrate that one of these factors- TIMP1- can stimulate cardiac myofibroblast proliferation in vitro. Inhibiting TIMP1 in-vivo reduced fibrosis in adult mice after MI. This study demonstrates the concept of cold fibrosis following acute MI and the feasibility of our circuit-to-target approach to better understand and treat fibrosis.
ORGANISM(S): Sus scrofa
PROVIDER: GSE247856 | GEO | 2025/02/18
REPOSITORIES: GEO
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