Circulating myeloid cells invade the central nervous system to mediate cachexia during pancreatic cancer
- Oregon Health & Science University, United States
Abstract
Weight loss and anorexia are common symptoms in cancer patients that occur prior to initiation of cancer therapy. Inflammation in the brain is a driver of these symptoms, yet cellular sources of neuroinflammation during malignancy are unknown. In a mouse model of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), we observed early and robust myeloid cell infiltration into the brain. Infiltrating immune cells were predominately neutrophils, which accumulated at a unique central nervous system entry portal called the velum interpositum, where they expressed CCR2. Pharmacologic CCR2 blockade and genetic deletion of Ccr2 both resulted in significantly decreased brain-infiltrating myeloid cells as well as attenuated cachexia during PDAC. Lastly, intracerebroventricular blockade of the purinergic receptor P2RX7 during PDAC abolished immune cell recruitment to the brain and attenuated anorexia. Our data demonstrate a novel function for the CCR2/CCL2 axis in recruiting neutrophils to the brain, which drives anorexia and muscle catabolism.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Sequencing data have been deposited in GEO under accession code GSE15006
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The transcriptional profile of neutrophils in different organs during pancreatic cancerNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE150061.
Article and author information
Author details
Kevin Glenn Burfeind
Katherine A Michaelis
Eileen Ruth Samson Torres
Funding
National Cancer Institute (R01CA184324-01)
- Daniel L Marks
National Cancer Institute (R01CA217989-01)
- Daniel L Marks
Brenden-Colson Center for Pancreatic Care
- Daniel L Marks
National Cancer Institute (5F30CA213745)
- Kevin Glenn Burfeind
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols of Oregon Health & Science University. The protocol was approved by the Department of Comparative Medicine of Oregon Health & Science University (protocol IP00038). All surgery was performed under isofluorane anesthesia, and every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Copyright
© 2020, Burfeind et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Circulating myeloid cells invade the central nervous system to mediate cachexia during pancreatic cancer
eLife 9:e54095.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.54095
Further reading
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In autoimmune type 1 diabetes (T1D), immune cells infiltrate and destroy the islets of Langerhans — islands of endocrine tissue dispersed throughout the pancreas. However, the contribution of cellular programs outside islets to insulitis is unclear. Here, using CO-Detection by indEXing (CODEX) tissue imaging and cadaveric pancreas samples, we simultaneously examine islet and extra-islet inflammation in human T1D. We identify four sub-states of inflamed islets characterized by the activation profiles of CD8+T cells enriched in islets relative to the surrounding tissue. We further find that the extra-islet space of lobules with extensive islet-infiltration differs from the extra-islet space of less infiltrated areas within the same tissue section. Finally, we identify lymphoid structures away from islets enriched in CD45RA+ T cells — a population also enriched in one of the inflamed islet sub-states. Together, these data help define the coordination between islets and the extra-islet pancreas in the pathogenesis of human T1D.
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The endothelial blood-brain barrier (BBB) strictly controls immune cell trafficking into the central nervous system (CNS). In neuroinflammatory diseases such as multiple sclerosis, this tight control is, however, disturbed, leading to immune cell infiltration into the CNS. The development of in vitro models of the BBB combined with microfluidic devices has advanced our understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms mediating the multistep T-cell extravasation across the BBB. A major bottleneck of these in vitro studies is the absence of a robust and automated pipeline suitable for analyzing and quantifying the sequential interaction steps of different immune cell subsets with the BBB under physiological flow in vitro. Here, we present the under-flow migration tracker (UFMTrack) framework for studying immune cell interactions with endothelial monolayers under physiological flow. We then showcase a pipeline built based on it to study the entire multistep extravasation cascade of immune cells across brain microvascular endothelial cells under physiological flow in vitro. UFMTrack achieves 90% track reconstruction efficiency and allows for scaling due to the reduction of the analysis cost and by eliminating experimenter bias. This allowed for an in-depth analysis of all behavioral regimes involved in the multistep immune cell extravasation cascade. The study summarizes how UFMTrack can be employed to delineate the interactions of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells with the BBB under physiological flow. We also demonstrate its applicability to the other BBB models, showcasing broader applicability of the developed framework to a range of immune cell-endothelial monolayer interaction studies. The UFMTrack framework along with the generated datasets is publicly available in the corresponding repositories.
