Down-Regulation of Homeobox Gene Ventx Promotes Expansion of Human Bone Marrow Hematopoietic Stem Cells (HSC)

Abstract 1272

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) give rise to mature cells of all lineages of blood and immune systems. HSC transplantation has shown great promise in the treatment of malignancies, reconstitution of hematopoietic systems and HSC-based gene therapy. Cell intrinsic factors/pathways have been the targets of intensive investigation for its potential application in HSC expansion. Over the past decades, several critical cell fate determination pathways, such as the Wnt signaling pathways and senescence pathways have been implicated in the proliferation and differentiation of HSC. Moreover, overexpression of HoxB4 and BMI1 was found to be able to expand human HSC 2∼3 folds. Nevertheless, the regulatory mechanisms of HSC proliferation and differentiation remain incompletely understood and safe and efficacious expansion of human HSC remains as a fundamental challenge that limits the clinical application of HSC-based therapy.

VentX is a human homologue of the Xenopus homeobox protein Xom of the BMP4 signaling pathway. Using Xenopus model and methods of reverse genetics, our recent work showed that VentX is a LEF/TCF associated Wnt repressor and an activator of senescence pathways. VentX expression is highly regulated and restricted in hematopoietic cells and serves a major regulator of hematopoietic cell differentiation. To explore the potential role of VentX in proliferation and differentiation of HSC during hematopoiesis, we quantified VentX expression during hematopoiesis, using qRT-PCR methods and examined the effects of altered VentX expression on HSC properties in vitro and in vivo.

Our data showed that VentX expression is significantly up-regulated during oncogenesis of hematopioetic cells. We demonstrated that lentiviral knockdown of VentX allowed for more than 5 fold ex vivo expansion of human HSC with balanced lineage development. Importantly, transient knockdown of VentX by siRNA also led to expansion of HSC. The effect of VentX down-regulation on the expansion of human HSC was also demonstrated by enhanced engraftment in the SCID/NODγ2^null mouse model. Consistent with its role as a novel regulator of HSC, overexpression of VentX significantly inhibited clonal genesis of HSC. Mechanistically, we demonstrated that VentX controls the expression of cell cycle regulators downstream of the Wnt and senescence pathways, such as the C-myc, CyclinD1 and p21.

In summary, using methods of reverse genetic and developmental modeling, we identified VentX as a novel regulator for expansion of human BM HSC. The results of our investigations provide novel insight in regulating HSC proliferation and differentiation. In addition, the findings that transient down-regulation of VentX by SiRNA lead to efficient expansion of bone marrow HSC suggests that VentX may serve as a novel target for safe expansion of HSC for its potential clinical applications.