Ephrin-B2-expressing natural killer cells induce angiogenesis

Katharine G Wolf; Emily B Crawford; Nora M Wartan; Sylvia K Schneiderman; Valerie E Riehl; Svetlana V Dambaeva; Kenneth D Beaman

doi:10.1016/j.jvssci.2022.08.003

Ephrin-B2-expressing natural killer cells induce angiogenesis

JVS Vasc Sci. 2022 Oct 27:3:336-344. doi: 10.1016/j.jvssci.2022.08.003. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Katharine G Wolf¹, Emily B Crawford¹, Nora M Wartan¹, Sylvia K Schneiderman¹, Valerie E Riehl¹, Svetlana V Dambaeva¹, Kenneth D Beaman¹

Affiliation

¹ Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, North Chicago, IL.

Abstract

Background: Therapeutic angiogenesis aims to induce new blood vessel growth in ischemic tissues; however, previous clinical trials have had limited success. Studies of uterine angiogenesis revealed a specialized subset of natural killer (NK) cells, called uterine NK (uNK) cells, which have unique proangiogenic abilities.

Methods: We show that uNK cells in mice express ephrin-B2, a regulator of angiogenesis, to induce tubule formation in an ex vivo coculture tubule formation assay. We next induced the expression of ephrin-B2 by splenic NK (sNK) cells harvested from male mice.

Results: We showed that induced NK (iNK) cells can also instruct endothelial cells to form tubules using ephrin-B2.

Conclusions: We concluded that Ephrin-B2 is a marker of proangiogenic uNK cells and that a proangiogenic phenotype characterized by ephrin-B2 can be induced in sNK cells to induce therapeutic angiogenesis.

Keywords: Ephrin-B2; Hypoxia; NK cell; Therapeutic angiogenesis.