Prominin-1/CD133+ Lung Epithelial Progenitors Protect from Bleomycin-induced Pulmonary Fibrosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
RATIONALE: The mouse model of bleomycin-induced lung injury offers an approach to study idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive interstitial lung disease with poor prognosis. Progenitor cell-based treatment strategies might combine antiinflammatory effects and the capacity for tissue repair. OBJECTIVES: To expand progenitor cells with reparative and regenerative capacities and to evaluate their protective effects on pulmonary fibrosis in vivo. METHODS: Prominin-1/CD133(+) epithelial progenitor cells (PEPs) were expanded from adult mouse lungs after digestion and culture of distal airways. Lung fibrosis was induced in C57Bl/6 mice by instillation of bleomycin. Two hours later, animals were transplanted with PEPs. Inflammation and fibrosis were assessed by immunohistochemistry, bronchoalveolar lavage fluid differentials, and real-time polymerase chain reaction. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: PEPs expanded from mouse lungs were of bone marrow origin, coexpressed stem and hematopoietic cell markers, and differentiated in vitro into alveolar type II surfactant protein-C(+) epithelial cells. In bleomycin-challenged mice, intratracheally injected PEPs engrafted into the lungs and differentiated into type II pneumocytes. Furthermore, PEPs suppressed proinflammatory and profibrotic gene expression, prevented the recruitment of inflammatory cells, and protected bleomycin-challenged mice from pulmonary fibrosis. Mechanistically, the protective effect depended on upregulation of inducible nitric oxide synthase in PEPs and nitric oxide-mediated suppression of alveolar macrophage proliferation. Accordingly, PEPs from iNOS(-/-) but not iNOS(+/+) mice failed to protect from bleomycin-induced lung injury. CONCLUSIONS: The combined antiinflammatory and regenerative capacity of bone marrow-derived pulmonary epithelial progenitors offers a promising approach for development of cell-based therapeutic strategies against pulmonary fibrosis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".