Project description:Objective- Psoriasis is an inflammatory skin disease which heightens the risk of cardiovascular disease. This study directly investigated vascular endothelial health and systemically altered pathways in psoriasis and matched controls. Approach and Results- Twenty patients (mean age, 40 years; 50% male) with active psoriasis and 10 age-, sex-matched controls were recruited. To investigate systemically alerted pathways, a deep sequencing omics approach was applied, including unbiased blood transcriptomic and targeted proteomic analysis. Vascular endothelial health was assessed by transcriptomic profiling of endothelial cells obtained from the brachial veins of recruited participants. Blood transcriptomic profiling identified inflammasome signaling as the highest differentially expressed canonical pathway ( Z score 1.6; P=1×10-7) including upregulation of CASP5 and interleukin ( IL) -1β. Proteomic panels revealed IL-6 as a top differentially expressed cytokine in psoriasis with pathway analysis highlighting IL-1β ( Z score 3.7; P=1.02×10-23) as an upstream activator of the observed upregulated proteins. Direct profiling of harvested brachial vein endothelial cells demonstrated inflammatory transcript (eg, IL-1β, CXCL10, VCAM-1, IL-8, CXCL1, Lymphotoxin beta, ICAM-1, COX-2, and CCL3) upregulation between psoriasis versus controls. A linear relationship was seen between differentially expressed endothelial inflammatory transcripts and psoriasis disease severity. IL-6 levels correlated with inflammatory endothelial cell transcripts and whole blood inflammasome-associated transcripts, including CASP5 and IL-1β. Conclusions- An unbiased sequencing approach demonstrated the inflammasome as the most differentially altered pathway in psoriasis versus controls. Inflammasome signaling correlated with psoriasis disease severity, circulating IL-6, and proinflammatory endothelial transcripts. These findings help better explain the heightened risk of cardiovascular disease in psoriasis. Clinical Trial Registration- URL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov . Unique identifier: NCT03228017.

Project description:Angiogenesis and lymphangiogenesis have important roles in cancer progression and chronic inflammatory diseases, but efficient therapies against these diseases have been hampered by the lack of identified vascular lineage-specific markers and growth factors. Using transcriptional profiling of matched pairs of human dermal blood vascular and lymphatic endothelial cells, we first identified 236 lymphatic and 342 blood vascular signature genes. In silico analyses of the biologic pathways associated with these genes revealed lineage-specific functions for each cell type. Using a selection of 85 identified vascular lineage-specific genes, we developed a TaqMan RT-PCR-based, microfluidic card-formatted low-density microvascular differentiation array (LD-MDA) that was used to reliably identify and quantify the degree of lineage-specific differentiation in different types of endothelial cells, and to detect admixture of lymphatic endothelial cells in commercial preparations of microvascular endothelial cells. Application of Prediction Relevance Ranking and analysis of variance of LD-MDA expression profiles of 43 lesional skin samples obtained from patients with the chronic inflammatory disease psoriasis led to identification of cytokines which are significantly associated with angiogenesis or lymphangiogenesis in vivo. In particular, interleukin-7 and fibroblast growth factor-12 were identified as novel (lymph)angiogenic factors. This technology provides a novel tool to quantify lineage-specific vascular differentiation and to characterize (lymph)angiogenesis in clinical samples obtained from angiogenic diseases. Keywords: Quantitative real time RT-PCR, psoriasis (chronic inflammation) study Guided by the gene array results, we selected 54 LEC-specific genes and 31 BEC-specific genes, based upon their consistent and strong specific expression in LEC or BEC, as well as on their assignment to important biological pathways. In addition, the five pan-endothelial cell marker genes PECAM-1, vWF, KDR, TEK, CDH5 and the six endogenous control genes ACTB, GAPDH, PGK1, PPIA, RPLP0 and S18 were included in the design of the LD-MDA. After extraction of total RNA, the mRNA expression levels of the 96 genes were analyzed by quantitative RT-PCR using the 7900HT Real-Time PCR System (Applied Biosystems).

Project description:Herein we demonstrate the efficacy of an unbiased proteomics screening approach for studying protein expression changes in the KC-Tie2 psoriasis mouse model, identifying multiple protein expression changes in the mouse and validating these changes in human psoriasis. KC-Tie2 mouse skin samples (n=3) were compared with littermate controls (n=3) using gel-based fractionation followed by label-free protein expression analysis. 5482 peptides mapping to 1281 proteins were identified and quantitated: 105 proteins exhibited fold-changes ≥2.0 including: stefin A1 (average fold change of 342.4 and an average P = 0.0082; cystatin A, human orthologue); slc25a5 (average fold change of 46.2 and an average P = 0.0318); serpinb3b (average fold change of 35.6 and an average P = 0.0345; serpinB1, human orthologue); and kallikrein related peptidase 6 (average fold change of 4.7 and an average P = 0.2474; KLK6). We independently confirmed mouse gene expression-based increases of selected genes including serpinb3b (17.4-fold, P < 0.0001), KLK6 (9.0-fold, P = 0.002), stefin A1 (7.3-fold; P < 0.001) and slc25A5 (1.5-fold; P = 0.05) using qRT-PCR on a second cohort of animals (n=8). Parallel LC/MS/MS analyses on these same samples verified protein-level increases of 1.3-fold (slc25a5; P < 0.05), 29,000-fold (stefinA1; P < 0.01), 322-fold (KLK6; P < 0.0001) between KC-Tie2 and control mice. To underscore the utility and translatability of our combined approach, we analyzed gene and protein expression levels in psoriasis patient skin and primary keratinocytes vs. healthy controls. Increases in gene expression for slc25a5 (1.8-fold), cystatin A (3.0-fold), KLK6 (5.8-fold) and serpinB1 (76-fold; all P < 0.05) were observed between healthy controls and involved lesional psoriasis skin and primary psoriasis keratinocytes. Moreover slc25a5, cystatin A, KLK6 and serpinB1 protein were all increased in lesional psoriasis skin compared to normal skin. These results highlight the usefulness of preclinical disease models using readily-available mouse skin and demonstrate the utility of proteomic approaches for identifying novel peptides/proteins that are differentially regulated in psoriasis that could serve as sources of auto-antigens or provide novel therapeutic targets for the development of new anti-psoriatic treatments.

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Inflammasome Signaling and Impaired Vascular Health in Psoriasis

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