Abstract
Chronic exposure to particulate pollution is suspected to exacerbate inflammatory respiratory diseases such as asthma characterized by an airway remodelling involving fibrosis. Our study aims to investigate whether the secretome from human bronchial epithelial (HBE) cells exposed to fine particulate matter (PM) induces fibroblast proliferation. Primary HBE cells grown on air liquid interface were repeatedly exposed to fine PM at 5 and 10 µg/cm² (four treatments, 48 hours apart) and maintained in culture for five weeks. Collected basolateral culture medium was used as a conditioned medium for the subsequent treatment of fibroblasts. We observed that the conditioned medium collected from HBE cells treated with fine PM increased the growth rate of fibroblasts compared to the conditioned medium collected from control HBE cells. Fibroblast phenotype assessed by the observation of the vimentin network was well preserved. The mitogenic effect of conditioned medium was reduced in the presence of anti-epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), anti-amphiregulin or anti-TGFa, underlining the role of EGFR ligands in fibroblast proliferation. When fibroblasts were co-cultured with HBE cells treated once with fine PM, they exhibited a higher growth rate than fibroblasts co-cultured with non-treated HBE cells. Altogether these data show that the exposure of HBE cells to fine PM induced the production of EGFR ligands in sufficient amount to stimulate fibroblast proliferation providing insight into the role of PM in airway remodelling.
Highlights
For several decades, air pollution has been considered a serious public health threat requiring the implementation of regulations to limit gaseous and particulate pollution
In order to test our hypothesis of a potential paracrine effect of epithelial secretome on lung fibroblasts, Wi-38 cells were exposed to basal culture media recovered when human bronchial epithelial (HBE) cells were repeatedly exposed to fine particulate matter (PM) as well as to basal culture media recovered in the weeks following the end of treatments
Treatments were performed on undifferentiated HBE cells just after they started to be grown at the air-liquid interface (ALI)
Summary
Air pollution has been considered a serious public health threat requiring the implementation of regulations to limit gaseous and particulate pollution. Our previous studies showed that bronchial epithelium responds to fine and ultrafine PM exposure by releasing pro-inflammatory mediators as well as epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) ligands such as amphiregulin and transforming growth factor alpha (TGFα) [3,4], that are found in high amounts in the sputum of asthmatics [5]. We took advantage of an experimental model, the primary culture of normal bronchial epithelial (HBE) cells grown at the air-liquid interface (ALI), which we developed for repeated exposures to PM [12], to investigate the effects of the epithelial secretome on fibroblasts. For this purpose two different approaches were used.
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