2006 Volume 15 Issue 3 Pages 89-95
Rheumatoid disease (RA) is one of the complex diseases that showed multiple progression stages. At first inflammatory response is occurred by self antibodies, and then the proliferation of synoviocytes is abnormally promoted. These synoviocytes invade into articular structures and finally articular cartilage is destroyed. In order to analyze growth-promoting factors in synovial cells from articular tissues of RA, we performed DNA microarray analysis and compared the expression patterns of their mRNA to that of synoviocytes from osteoarthritis (OA). The results showed that the expression of many genes was up-regulated in RA synoviocytes comparing with OA synoviocytes. Among these genes, RT-PCR analysis revealed that Wnt-1-induced secreted protein 2 (WISP-2, CCN5) and protein 3 (WISP-3, CCN6) which are belong to the novel gene family, CCN, were highly up-regulated in RA synoviocytes. In addition, one truncated isoform of WISP-3 which may be related to the ongoing of some type of RA, was detected in RA synoviocytes. Furthermore, immunohistochemical analysis showed that the products of both CCN genes were highly distributed in active synoviocytes of articular tissues of RA. These results indicate that both CCN genes and their products play some roles in the progression of RA.
